2013

This Great Graphic, created on Bloomberg, shows the US dollar is threatening to move above a trendline against the Canadian dollar drop off the 2011 and 2012 highs. The proximate cause is the dismal retail sales report., which collapsed…

downgraded the domestic- and foreign-currency government bond ratings of the United Kingdom by one notch to Aa1 from Aaa. The outlook on the ratings is now stable.

Bill Gross, co-chief investment officer at Pacific Investment Management Co., talks about the outlook for Federal Reserve monetary policy and debt purchases, known as quantitative easing. Gross also discusses the state of credit markets and…

Recent Bulgarian developments are worth discussing. Austerity just brought down another European government, as Prime Minister Borisov and his cabinet resigned this week amidst rising popular protests against his policies. But the story…

The best chances of balancing a strong government with a reform agenda also looks the most likely. It is the center-left winning the Chamber of Deputies and then forming a coalition with Monti's centrists to secure a majority in the…

News links for 21 February 2013

Serious technical damage on the foreign currencies is being inflicted. The euro is falling through the uptrend drawn off last July (Draghi-induced) lows. It comes in just below $1.3200 today. The next technical target is near…

The lessons for China, if I am right, are that China should forego the idea of nurturing national champions and should instead encourage brutal domestic competition. Beijing should also eliminate subsidies to production, the most important…

Eurozone policy seems driven by market sentiment. This column argues that fear and panic led to excessive, and possibly self-defeating, austerity in the south while failing to induce offsetting stimulus in the north. The resulting deflation…

Sweden has been one of the countries to have best weathered the economic crisis. Despite a hiccup in its domestic economy and the extra deflationary impulse from souring loans to the Baltics in 2009, the Swedish economy has been remarkably…