2012

I was on RT's Capital Account last night talking to Lauren Lyster about the euro zone debt crisis. At the end of the show, we came up against the deficit problem and the question about how it should be solved. I get frustrated by this topic…

The two charts below give one a sense of the relative size of the government debt markets in the euro zone as well as the size of those markets compared to each country's GDP. Estonia has both the smallest government debt market and the…

I highly recommend the FT article on China's 1% in the links below. They bring up the capital flight problem that a Chinese hard landing might mean. I noted last April that Victor Shih gave a talk at INET on the Fragile State of China’s FX…

In less than a week's time, the Facebook IPO has gone from the most-hyped technology event since Google went public into "blame-storming" mode. Details concerning the stock's sudden drop, the market's inability to process orders, and the…

I wrote a post earlier in the week at the New York Times on Eurobonds. I will be on RT at 4:30PM Eastern talking about Europe and the global economy. Here's my basic conclusion on Eurobonds

Editor's Note: Below is the press release from the FDIC

This is a quick note here on Latin American economies where currency issues are the main story. Argentina has been most often in the news, but the slowdown in Brazil should be top on the radar. I also note that some European banks are…

Here's a chart via Bloomberg that gives the overall picture. The data are poor in all regions including Germany and France. Markit, which collects the data, says that the latest PMIs are consistent with GDP in Europe contracting 0.5% this…

It was not the news stream, which was poor to say the least. The flash European PMI and German IFO warns that even the German economy may be fizzling. UK Q1 GDP was revised down. Yet by the news hit the euro selling appears to exhaust…

The European fiscal compact which calls for EU countries to stay within the Maastricht treaty government deficit hurdle of 3% of GDP has already been signed off on by all 27 EU governments except the United Kingdom and the Czech Republic.…