2020

Those of you who know my writing from days gone day, when Credit Writedowns was a blog, know that I gave up advocating for policy responses a long time ago. Not to be a defeatist, but the lesson I learned from the Great Financial Crisis was…

In yesterday's post, I was mostly upbeat about near-term economic outcomes. The overall gist was that we are going to see a snapback recovery soon that makes this the shortest recession on record. But, the snapback won't get us to anywhere…

Yesterday was a nice little rally in shares on the back of good news about a virus trial and stimulus support in the US and Europe. That saw us get well over the 61.8% retracement level for the S&P500, where there had been a lot of…

I ended yesterday's post writing that the only thing one could predict with certainty was that there will be policy errors going forward. When faced with so much uncertainty on both the healthcare front and on economic policy, it's…

I took a hiatus from writing for a few days to see if I could get a clearer perspective. But, the reality is that there is no visibility to anything going forward. Making longer-term predictions is probably a fool's errand then.…

I am waiting for the jobs numbers out of the US as I begin this post. On Wednesday, we got a preview via the private sector unemployment numbers released by ADP. They showed a loss of more than 20 million jobs, which was pretty much in line…

We are now entering the insolvency phase of this recession, where, despite government's best efforts, the weakest companies go under and unemployment rises. This shakeout will take months. But the economy will rebound out of recession well…

Although the title of this post focuses on Sweden, I intend it to mostly be a links post with various sub-themes. The idea is to share the news flow I am seeing across different countries. Since this is the first links post in a while,…

Last week, a friend from business school who I met up with in New York in early March told me she had taken an antibody test for coronavirus and came back positive. Her first thought was about donating blood, whereas my first thought was…

Real quick here because I am a bit under the weather The snapback This morning I retweeted a tweet by former Fed economist Claudia Sahm about the dire economic numbers in the US, saying: Can we call this a depression already? What…