2011

Almost everything that happened last week is irrelevant given what looks like a U.S. debt deal. What we’re watching is how the relief rally holds and whether the Friday’s poor GDP data was a game changer. Looking under the surface of the…

The normal case—let us say, in the US or the UK or Japan—is that anything for sale is for sale in the domestic currency. These sovereign governments never find that they cannot buy something by issuing their own currency. However, the…

The signal we’re extracting from the weekly move of the Four Horsemen is that though concern and the lack of confidence in the U.S. over the debt ceiling issue has increased, other factors, such as the deflationary consequences of a large…

Included in the BEA's first ("Advance") estimate of second quarter 2011 GDP were significant downward revisions to previously published data, some of it dating back to 2003. Astonishingly, the BEA even substantially cut their annualized GDP…

The Hungarian government’s much publicised unorthodox plans to cut the country’s public debt level has been attracting a lot of attention of late, both from the media and from the rating agencies. Some observers have been quite positively…

Bunds Soar on Safety Bid; Italian, Spanish, Greek Bonds Slump - Bloomberg tags: government bonds Italy United States…

BGA-Präsident : Kein Verständnis für Handeln der US-Politiker - International - Politik - Handelsblatt tags: debt ceiling…

The coin seignorage idea has really caught on - not just in the blogosphere, but in the mainstream media as well. You have Brad DeLong, Matt Yglesias, Tyler Cowen and a lot of others talking up ‘The Coin’. In the mainstream media, the…

The latest batch of GDP numbers saw some heavy downward revisions to prior numbers, especially during the recession of 2008-2009. In fact, the GDP revisions were so extensive, they put us back in the 'technical recovery' phase i.e. where we…

Procyclicality is fine for states as a constraint despite how they exacerbate the swings in the business cycle, creating deadweight losses. The federal government can always counter this pro-cyclicality and smooth out the cycle. This is one…