May 2011

Brazil is reportedly imposing trade barriers on auto parts imports and a variety of other products. Imports of 27 products will reportedly have tighter licensing requirements that can take up to 60 days to approve. These are called…

QE is, in fact, a ‘crop failure’ for the dollar. The Fed’s shifting of securities out of the economy and replacing them with clearing balances removes interest income. And the lower rates from Fed policy also reduces interest paid to the…

A fall in commodity prices increases the potential for financial market disruption and non-performing loan problems in China.

As workers continue to battle with the crippled Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant, more impacts from the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl are starting to arise. The latest impact will hit car manufacturers, with plants in central Japan…

The narrative has shifted recently with regards to Greece. Greece had been portrayed by many as a small economy one tenth the size of Germany whose debt problems could be solved by throwing EU/IMF money at it. Now, Greece appears to have…

Jeremy Grantham is seriously bearish again. In part 2 of his latest quarterly newsletter, he departs from the peak resources argument he made in part 1 and focuses on the overvaluation in stocks. His advice: sell!

Below are two charts from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The first shows the US Consumer Price Index for all urban consumers from 1913 through March. The second shows the same data from 1990. The US has generally had a positive…

Guest Author Polyvios Petropolous argues that the European Union must put in place the contingency plans for a Greek debt restructuring in secret before the plan is announced and executed. To end bailouts without such a plan in place would…

The following editorial by Timo Soini, the head of the True Finns party in Finland, on perceived corporatism in the EU bailouts of the eurozone periphery appeared in Monday's Wall Street Journal. We are reprinting it here because the…

Systemic risk is not driven by close macro integration. If this were the case, US states would have far higher exposure to systemic credit risk. Instead, systemic exposure is very high for European sovereigns. The roots of systemic risk lie…