2012

The EU informal summit will be held over a dinner and despite the attention it is receiving, it still seems unreasonable to expect anything concrete. Today's informal EU summit is not the real thing. It is out of the late June summit that a…

The Financial Times has gone through the very useful exercise of creating a decision tree on what a Greek exit from the euro zone entails. I think the Europeans are now actively preparing for a Grexit because to not do so would be folly.…

The news flow today is about the same as it has been throughout the week: JPMorgan Chase and Facebook in the US and Greece and to a lesser degree now Spain in the EU. I think these are the wrong narratives to be focused on. As I wrote…

Not a lot to say today but I do have a lot of links. The stories today are all the same, which is why I don't have a lot to add. One story to note is that the German government is now borrowing 2-year money at zero percent. This tells…

When I listed my Ten Surprises for 2012 in January I predicted that China would have a hard landing, defined as quarterly growth below 5% annualised by the end of this year. But I also said that India would be worse than China. And it is…

ELA is the acronym for Emergency Lending Assistance. This is direct lending by the national central bank, with ECB authorization to local banks with more liberal collateral requirements. The national central bank is responsible/liable for…

Ray Dalio was featured in Barron's at the weekend. He spoke about the various options available to affect a private sector deleveraging. He sees three ways which he calls austerity, restructuring, and money printing. Below is an excerpt…

Michael Pettis had a great write-up on the situation in Spain and Europe's depressing prospects. While his conclusion that Spain will be forced to exit the euro zone is something I have yet to endorse, the logic he uses surrounding many of…

The talk about Greece being kicked out of the euro zone has clearly been overdone. Some have suggested that the Germans had reached their fill and that they would 'stare the Greeks down' in this high stakes game of chicken. I have…

As always, I have a lot of links on Monday. Three or four stories have dominated the news in each market for the past week. In the US, it is about either JPMorgan Chase's escalating losses, Facebook's IPO or the general aimlessness of the…