2014

This is the first time I am doing this, so let’s see how much value it adds. I thought I would quickly run through a number of countries in the news and give my perspective on the macro picture in each. I am just going to give a summary…

Last week, the ECB announced that it would begin purchasing securities backed by bank lending to households and firms. Whereas markets and the media have generally greeted this announcement with enthusiasm, this column identifies reasons…

Britain faces a crisis of monumental proportions as the Scottish electorate decides whether to leave the Union and make Scotland a fully independent country for the first time since 1707 when it first entered into political union with…

There is now a provisional date for that woeful collision to occur: the 9 November this year, the date chosen by the Catalan parliament for the holding a popular (non binding, not a referendum) consultation under a new law which will…

I have always thought that the soft landing/hard landing debate wholly misses the point when it comes to China’s economic prospects. It confuses the kinds of market-based adjustments we are likely to see in the US or Europe with the much…

What I am going to discuss today is financial gimmickry and wage growth. This piece is an outgrowth of a piece I am writing for the New York Times on corporate buybacks and capital investment plus a segment I recently did on Boom Bust at RT…

The big news today was the ECB’s decision to lower interest rates 10 basis points to 0.05% and its simultaneous decision to engage in a form of quantitative easing using the asset-backed market as a vehicle. While these measures are…

The gist of the piece here is that, while I see a cyclical recovery that is gathering pace, the Achilles heel of the recovery from a sustainability perspective is wage growth. To the degree the Fed normalizes policy now before wage growth…

Welcome back to Credit Writedowns! Labor Day is behind us now and I intend to have a much more regular posting schedule going forward. But the lack of posts has given me some time to reflect on the global macro situation without the need…

Despite the title, this is not a mono-themed post but more of a highlight of recent news and data and their importance in interpreting the direction of the economy and potential effect on markets. I do want to concentrate on European and US…