2015

Portugal’s election on 4 October was inconclusive, without any party winning an absolute majority of the votes. The President of the country, a former Prime Minister, allowed his own party, led by incumbent Prime Minister Pedro Passos…

Ever since Willem Buiter’s call for a global recession within the next two years, people have been parsing the data for some indication that the US has been fatally compromised by contagion from emerging markets. Nothing in Buiter’s piece…

With two recent Fed governors - Tarullo and Brainard - expressing a need for caution with normalizing Fed policy, I wanted to break down how I tend to think about monetary policy and its affect on resource allocation and private portfolio…

Germany is a very open economy given its size, with exports at 45.6% of GDP compared to less than 14% for the United States. This makes Germany more vulnerable than most to the global growth slowdown, especially given its recent turn to…

The first time I wrote about shale oil resource misallocation in the wake of lower oil prices was back in October 2014, exactly a year ago. A lot has happened in that year, so I want to look back at the oil-related posts I have written in…

The equity markets that have fallen the least so far are the U.S. and the Japanese markets. If my prediction that we are looking into a more difficult period in the U.S. (and the euro zone), U.S. equities look particularly vulnerable, so…

Yesterday I retweeted an interesting tweet by Business Insider’s Henry Blodget which references an article on data compiled by Barclays on profit mean reversion and recession. The gist of the article is that a profits recession generally…

Today, we got a pretty shaky US jobs report. Non-Farm Payrolls were up only 142,000, well below the 190-203,000 range of median expectations I have seen quoted. But the previous month was also revised down to 136,000 from 173,000 and July…

John Boehner is not conservative enough. At least that's what the firebrand Republicans in the US House of Representatives believe. And so he has resigned from his position as Speaker of the House and will resign Congress altogether as…

Now that I am writing for free again, let me give you a quick update on what I'm thinking about. I still think the removal of China as a marginal buyer of last resort is the macro event that dominates all others. But there are a few…