2012

We must stress that opening talks does not mean that a deal is going to be easy. In our view, Hungary did the bare minimum to get the EU back to the negotiating table, and that difficult negotiations remain ahead. On a separate but related…

Bloomberg TV spoke to Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein today in a much discussed interview. Below is the video and partial transcript of that interview. I provide it without comment.

Recent events in Europe mark the beginning of the push back against German-led austerity, but it is even bigger as the IMF's call for the ECB to cut rates illustrates

I thought now would be a good time to see how my ten surprises for 2012 are tracking as we are nearly a third of the way through the year. I posted these as my first weekly newsletter and these are events that have 1-in-3 odds of happening…

The Greek private sector can generally only rely on the Greek banking system for credit. At the same time the Greek private sector is moving liquidity out of the country, dramatically shrinking the availability of credit.

I have noted a number of times in the past that household debt levels in Canada have reached worrying levels. I am not the only one on to this. Canadian central bank head Mark Carney was in the news yesterday sounding the alarm on this as…

Professor Steve Keen was on Tonight with Vincent Browne in Ireland last week, where the topic understandably was the European Union. The question for Steve was how the Maastricht Treaty fits his economic paradigm, which follows Hyman…

A brief note on why Apple did so well this quarter.

This is just an update to this morning's post. The numbers were profit of $12.30 a share ($11.62 billion), up from $6.40 a share ($5.98 billion) last year.

JPMorgan recently performed a study on the composition of portfolios managed by life insurance companies. The study looked at the top 20 life insurance firms using their regulatory filings. These are the portfolios set up to support…