2012

By Michael Pettis In the past two weeks we have been treated with a mostly positive but nonetheless mixed bag of economic data from China. There has been good news, bad news, good news with worrying underlying trends, and bad news with…

Jeremy Grantham's quarterly piece is out now and the important topic is the lack of growth in the US. The way that Grantham paints the picture - and I believe this is an accurate depiction - the US is not just suffering from a cyclical…

Note: this daily will not have links as I am still on holiday. But, I will begin to post more in the coming week and resume a normal posting schedule next week. Yesterday, Moody's Investors Service finally downgraded the sovereign credit…

Editor's note: Moody's issued the following ratings notice today Moody's Investors Service has today downgraded France's government bond rating by one notch to Aa1 from Aaa. The outlook remains negative. Today's rating action follows…

Last month I wrote a weekly post on the technology industry noting that the paradigm shift to cloud computing is in full swing. The most important facet of cloud computing in terms of business model disruption is its effects on platform…

I am still in vacation mode but I will start to post a lot more thematic content over the next two weeks. This post will concentrate on the mobile handset market and is based largely on a recent market analysis by Gartner. Earlier in the…

The last post I wrote on endogenous money and fully reserved banking set out a case for viewing the demand for credit to attain real or financial assets as a fundamental aspect of any monetary system. The point of that post was to make…

After the Great Depression broke out, American economist Irving Fischer championed a view of the financial system now called "endogenous money", which sees each person in the economy as a creator of credit. Viewing the economy through this…

A few weeks ago, I postulated that Christine Lagarde was increasingly moving the IMF away from its position as 'enforcer' of orthodox neoclassical economic policy. I backed this up with three specific ways in which the IMF was becoming a…

Note: I am going to be playing catch up here for a while since I have been away from my computer for most of the week. So this is the first in a series of post reviewing what the US political elections mean for the economy and markets. I…