2011

The Ministry of Finance is pumping money like mad into the weakened Chinese financial sector, over 1 trillion yuan, in order to shore it up from the souring of loans from all of the malinvestment over the past few years. If the Chinese…

Another awesome piece of work from our friends over at The Chart Store. The chart below is a times series of the numbers of hours of work — based on the average hourly wage — needed to buy a barrel of crude oil. Given the current wage of…

Lessons From the Failure of MF Global - WSJ.com The number that ended up killing MF Global Holdings Ltd. lay buried in a 139-page regulatory filing. The second row of a table on page 78 of the securities firm's latest annual…

If you are still inclined to give Greece the benefit of the doubt, I suggest you study the works of Egan-Jones, a credit rating company located in Haverford, Pennsylvania. Contrary to most other rating companies, Egan-Jones does not receive…

European shares are rebounding after a two-day decline; dollar is mostly higher in G10. Italian politics remains front and center ahead of budget vote; UK outlook remains sluggish. With US calendar light, markets likely to focus on Fed…

Here’s a spoof video of how Facebook is monetising its site. Genius.

Assuming that the Greek and Italian political situation stabilize, the focus may shift back to the Iberia. The risk is that the new Spanish government will report a larger budget deficit and weaker finances in general than the outgoing…

Countries like Italy are simply not going to be able to grow their way out of the problem. Everyone is recognizing this now. Until Italy was at the heart of the crisis, we could all delude ourselves that this crisis could be met with…

The economic data in the US has been somewhat better of late but the ECRI’s Lakshman Achuthan argues that this is meaningless; you can’t repeal the business cycle. His view is that the indicators pointing to an end of cycle slowing into…

The euro zone periphery was a sideshow. This stuff with Italy is the real deal. With yields at 6.7% and rising, it’s game over for the euro zone. The extend and pretend stuff ain’t gonna work.