2012

Housing starts in the US were up today. The Wall Street Journal writes that number came in at 717,000, up from a low of 478,000 in April 2009.

I just re-opened the thread on "How and why Greece will leave the euro zone" because there has been so much chatter about a Greek exit. I am still a bit in disbelief that Europe would allow the Greek economy to crumble so much thy would be…

The chart below via Reuters' Scott Barber is what an economic depression looks like. It covers Greek bank deposits from 1998 to present.

Spanish bond yields are spiking with no obvious reason to believe they will come down anytime soon. That puts the Spanish-German 10-year spread at an all time high.

Euro zone bond markets have come completely unhinged this morning. Spanish 10-year yields have hit the highest level this year at 6.5%. While Italian 10-year yields broke above 6% for the first time since late January. Meanwhile, German…

The big headline today is still JPMorgan Chase and it's huge trading losses. Clearly this is a black eye for JPM but the question goes to what longer term consequences the incident will have.

In February I wrote about the political economy of a Greek default (and euro zone exit), predicting that a Grexit was all but inevitable. In the last few days, there has been an almost feverish debate about this issue, so I wanted to update…

Ever more voices are talking about the possibility of Greece leaving the euro zone despite the fact that there is no formal mechanism for a euro are member country to exit the single currency. This talk, however, makes sense because…

The latest data out of China will give those expecting a soft landing pause about China's economic situation. While inflation has come down somewhat of late, so too have industrial output and capital investment. This is creating EM feedback…

This is not a good day for Spain. The day began with the EU Commission revising its estimates for the Spanish economy. The contraction is now expected to be considerably deeper. Spain unveiled its new efforts to address the banking…