2012

The US pension bailout fund PBGC is already stretched and may require more taxpayer money. Now it would be taking over pensions that will be even more underfunded, with asset values way below the present value of the liabilities. And more…

the ECB decided to prop up the German economy with low interest rates, rates that produced negative real interest rates and housing bubbles in Ireland and Spain. This was a policy designed to "bail out" the indebted German economy. We…

I guess we will never know whether or not Mariano Rajoy uttered the two magic words so effectively immortalized in song by Aretha Franklin that Saturday afternoon in late May as he cruised down the Chicago River in what Spanish media called…

Reports of a cool new product out of Nokia give investors some hope that the company's product palette can keep the loss-making company alive as its cash resources dwindle. My understanding is that the latest cuts at Nokia will include the…

The latest data out of Argentina are just one month's data. But the trend is clear and it is alarming: economic growth is slowing dramatically in Argentina. Three articles in Argentine dailies point out the nexus of issues developing around…

I normally don't post at the weekend these days but I came across two links that I wanted to comment on today. The first is from an article in German daily Die Welt about the situation in Greece. While the article's tone takes a fairly…

Not a lot of links today. One link I did want to talk about was the Barron's Roundtable Midyear Update. It's largely the same cast it has been for a few years but for the past few years, the topics have been heavily macro instead of…

I would submit then that the problem is the debt. This is true right across the developed economies. Until the debt is reduced, global growth will be slow and that makes economies susceptible to recession. As much as the President wants to…

It is clear that Greece will be unable to hit their deficit targets. According to Die Zeit, Greece is already lagging on tax revenues and privatization proceeds. This is why the German government is already debating relaxing Greece’s…

Daily commentary Nokia is finished in my view. It was clear before they switched to the Windows Mobile platform that their existing platform was not going to survive the onslaught from smart phones with Apple iOS and Android operating…