2017

Yesterday’s most interesting headline in the Wall Street Journal was “The World’s Most Radical Experiment in Monetary Policy Isn’t Working”. After reading it, the right questions to ask are “why isn’t the policy working?” and “what does…

Here's an example of Germany's leading by example on fiscal policy.

Imagine you could issue 30- or 50-year paper today at 3 or 4%. And you have a strong suspicion that - in the future - 2-year paper won’t be 1.15% like it is today. You think it could be 4, 5 or 6%. Why not lock in the long-term rates of…

The problem with the Trump administration’s talk about lengthening the maturity of debt issuance is that it confuses the future path of interest rates with the steepness of the yield curve. They talk about locking in low rates. And what…

You probably heard that Germany recorded its third consecutive year of government budget surpluses. This year it was the highest full year surplus since German reunification - 24 billion euros. A lot of the commentary on this will stress…

Forget about the executive orders and Trump press conferences. This is all for show - reality TV, if you will. Concentrate instead on what actually happens, what policies are actually implemented and what impact this is going to have on the…

Yesterday, I was talking to a veteran journalist based in Rome. He remarked that youth unemployment in southern Italy was 60% and that this was one of the biggest problems to deal with politically. The spectre of strong, able-bodied young…

Earlier today, I was listening to an interview with IMF head Christine Lagarde dance around the issue of the unsustainability of Greece’s debt load. And she said something very telling. She said that debt haircuts were not on the table but…

Bloomberg View had a good column today on the popularity of the European single currency. The article shows how the euro has gone from being unloved in Germany at introduction in 2002 to well accepted, while the opposite has happened in…

This is going to be a quick hit post to get some thoughts down on paper because a few threads are coalescing for me that I want to give some coherence to. The essence of the threads revolves around the tension at the Fed between normalizing…