2012

Simply cutting the deficit back and cleaning up bank balance sheets won’t get the economy back to growth. Indeed this habit of continually getting behind the curve, and trying vainly now that the economy is spiralling almost out of control…

The headline story here points out very clearly why Japan has two lost decades behind it. The country tries to gin up growth via fiscal and monetary stimulus when it lapses into recession. A gaping hole opens up in the government's books.…

And going beyond April, the political arithmetic of a post Monti government looks complicated, making the kind of stability needed to advance what the population may well see as “harsh” reforms unlikely. In other words, as Monti says, when…

According to recent media reports, the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is about to announce the appointment of University of Chicago professor and former International Monetary Fund Chief Economist Raghuram Rajan as India's chief…

The data pointing to the synchronised global slowdown continues. This time we have a string of data from the United States, the United Kingdom, India and China telling us that the economy is not doing well. Here I am leaving Europe aside.…

While the ECB may certainly now buy as many peripheral bonds as it wishes if it deems convertibility risk to be a real issue money is already trickling into cash strapped peripheral economies through the arcane tool of emergency liquidity…

I do have a lot of links though and here they are. The big issue is the economic slowing in the US and Europe. These articles demonstrate that the global slowdown is spreading beyond the eurozone periphery and is well entrenched in the US…

One thing Austrians harp on is the misallocation of resources caused by heavy handed and persistent interest rate market intervention. They are right that the industrial organization and the structure of investment capital priorities is…

A key negative side effect of persistently low rates on households is the delay of retirement. This inability of many Americans to retire on their savings because of low rates is keeping them in the workforce, limiting job opportunities for…

The rally in leveraged finance markets is back on, as investors snap up junk bonds as quickly as they come to market.