2014

Detroit was allowed to declare bankruptcy last year. While economists often focus on the barriers to entry, by removing the stigma from bankruptcy and easing the process, it makes lowers the barriers to exit. This stands in stark contrast…

Ukraine's financial situation continued to unravel today as the currency gave up another 10% - and seems to be in free fall.

The two main drivers of the capital markets today have been the biggest one day loss in the Chinese yuan and new that the preliminary Eurozone February CPI did not tick down as many expected. The headline rate was unchanged at 0.8%, though…

By Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, Amir Kermani, James Kwak, Todd Mitton This post was originally published at Vox. Political connections affect economic outcomes in emerging markets. This column discusses new evidence showing that…

News links for 27 February 2014

The aim of the above header is to link two names in people’s minds, both of them Italian: Mario Draghi and Matteo Renzi. Naturally the idea is not original, the FT’s Peter Spiegel recently published an entire blog post (Does Renzi owe his…

Yesterday, I began my Ten Surprises List. As a reminder, the surprise list is loosely based off Byron Wien’s list of ten surprises which he has conducting doing at Blackstone and Morgan Stanley for the last thirty years. Wien defines his…

News links for 26 February 2014

Spot USD/CNY closed above the fix today for the first time since September 2012. Other factors are at work in China currently, making it even harder to read the true intentions of Chinese policymakers. All of these developments come against…

Marshall Auerback was on CNBC yesterday afternoon talking to Kelly Evans and Steve Liesman on Closing Bell. And his read on the US economy is like mine, 1.5-2.0% underlying growth. He thinks the weak Q1 numbers are not just weather-related.…