May 2011

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of talking on CNBC along with Marc Chandler of Brown Brothers Harriman about the European sovereign debt crisis. I also wrote a piece in the New York Times about the same issue, concentrated on Greece. While…

This is what I’m listening to tonight. Enjoy. P.S. – I was on CNBC with Marc Chandler of Brown Brothers Harriman and wrote a piece in the New York Times this afternoon on the European sovereign debt crisis. I will have more on this and the…

It was a novel idea back in the mid-1970s, when The Six Million Dollar Man hit the airwaves. Austin, a man badly damaged in an accident, was reconstructed by substituting more efficient bionic implants for some of his human parts.…

Looking through the latest round of EU GDP data, one thing is becoming increasingly obvious: when it comes to future monetary policy decisions at the ECB, and to exactly how many more interest rate hikes we are going to see, then the…

When the pejorative acronym PIGS was first created, it was supposed to be a moniker for the southern European states (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain). However, Italy has done much better than housing-crisis stricken Ireland and so…

This note from Andy Lee shows a potentially bearish trend developing in the US stock market, with the S&P500 breaking down below it’s long-term trendline since the Federal Reserve started its second campaign of quantitative easing.

The dollar is stronger across the board as periphery strains and soft data weigh on euro This week US data is likely to remain mixed and limit euro’s slide; China’s flash PMI moderates Our sovereign ratings model suggests that the…

Here are some thoughts regarding the late Friday cut in outlook to negative for Italy’s A+ rating by S&P. While we remain negative on the ratings for peripheral euro zone, we don't think a downgrade of Italy by S&P is clearly…

By Claus Vistesen One of the reasons that I have always had a problem with Goldman Sachs' infamous notion of the BRIC economies was not the fact that it excluded other important economies such as e.g Chile or Indonesia, but rather that…

The change of power on the regional level is important in Spain because of their relative fiscal autonomy. Regions control spending on health care and education and account for half of government employees. They have an outstanding debt of…