2011

The guys at Brown Brothers Harriman said this morning that we shouldn’t expect much from the G-20. They seem pretty pessimistic about the politics in Greece too. If you want a visual representation of what they’re saying, here you go.

BBC News - Kellogg's outlook suffers after axing 'too many jobs' Cereal maker Kellogg's has announced a $70m (£43.6m) investment in its factories after too many job cuts undermined production standards. tags: jobs…

The bulls assert that the market is already discounting major risk and is reflecting widespread fear that may prove unfounded. That might be true if the market had collapsed as in 2000-2002 or 2008-2009. However, the current market is more…

Markets are cautiously optimistic ahead of Greek confidence vote, US payrolls and G20. US private payrolls expected to increase by 125k; Greek headlines still likely to drive price action. G20 unlikely to deliver much in terms of policy…

I would say that Stiglitz is right that Iceland did well in large measure because Iceland was not subjected to the kind of austerity that you traditionally see in these kinds of programs and which is an anti-growth policy. We are seeing the…

"Yesterday, the headline in the Frankfurter Zeitung was “Democracy is Junk.” The meaning was the financial sector was saying that democracy is incompatible with collecting debts and, when debtors can’t pay, with foreclosing on the public…

Harvard Economist Kenneth Rogoff has a post up at Project Syndicate which does a good job in laying out the conundrum that Europe faces in the sovereign debt crisis. He theme is exchange rates and currency revulsion. But the underlying…

"The treaties indeed confirm what we have been saying here: the treaty doesn't foresee an exit from the euro zone without exiting the EU, so indeed that is the current situation." -European Commission spokeswoman Karolina…

This post describes how austerity works in the European Monetary System where the euro is used as a currency. I will start by framing the difference between currency users and currency creators, then move to how central banks and government…

This post is intended to be a hopefully brief synopsis of how the monetary system works using an Austrian framing with MMT terminology. If you don’t know what that means, you’ll see what I mean as I proceed. MMTers like to say that money…