2013

Martin Wolf has written a column in the FT with which I agree, claiming that Germany is a weight on the world. The essence of his argument is that Germany’s export-led growth model is a ‘beggar-thy-neighbor’ policy in a world short of…

Europe is in the sweet spot right now, with recovery looking like it has taken hold. Greece remains an outlier. The question is what will happen to Greece over the medium- to- long-term. I believe the answer is an exit from the euro zone.…

With wages stagnant, the proportion of income going into rent is on the rise. While homeowners have been able to reduce their monthly payments to the lowest level in decades via mortgage refinancing and cutting back on credit card usage,…

News links for 5 Nov 2013

I want to pick up where I left off yesterday and highlight the growth dichotomy between Euroland on the one hand and the U.S. and the U.K. on the other. Yesterday I wrote that the risk is to the upside in the U.S. (and the U.K.) if…

News links for 4 Nov 2013

This morning I made the argument that the global economy is growing across the breadth of developed and developing economies. I still have a problem with Europe though as I believe the risk is to the downside. Basically, the policy response…

The higher demand for leveraged loans is helping to gradually increase leverage of buyout transactions. But a more alarming trend is the sharp relaxation of lending terms - the so-called "cov-lite" (covenant-light) deals. Over 70% of recent…

The latest data out of Europe shows the economy in the euro zone continuing to expand and suggests that we are probably in a technical recovery. In Europe, however, the threat to recovery is to the downside, whereas in the U.S. the main…

When the working age population grows faster than the broad population, demographics become a tailwind as far as economic growth is concerned. Hence, what is likely to become a significant headwind for advanced economies in terms of…