Economy

The global crisis of 2008-09 hit emerging markets nearly as hard as it hit rich countries, which is welcome news compared to previous crises in which emerging markets often suffered much more than developed economies. This column explores…

Annual growth on the VocaLink Public Sector Take Home Pay Index stands at 1.3% and in the private sector, growth has fallen to 2.9%.

The essence of classical free market economics was to restrict Executive power – in an epoch when war-making power was the major abuse of national interests. Just as the lower house of bicameral legislatures had taken over the power to…

Editor’s note: The US government reported that the unemployment rate fell to 9.1%, with non-farm payrolls at +117,000. That exceeds forecasts. However, the labor participation rate was down to 63.9, the lowest since 1983. People are still…

The point is that this is a rolling crisis where investors have realised that the sovereign debt profiles right across Euroland have problems. And because there is no lender of last resort, the weakest debtors get plucked off one by one…

This is a classic liquidity crisis. Bond markets in Europe are selling off. Commercial paper markets in the US are seizing up. Retail investors in Asia are already running for safety in overnight trading. What we are experiencing is a…

Here’s my take on the wideners.

Elga Bartsch, a ECB shadow council member and Chief European Economist at Morgan Stanley, talked to Bloomberg about the sovereign debt crisis today. She said that the ECB would be hard-pressed to do a 180 on its hawkish tightening position…

Patrick Chovanec talked to Bloomberg earlier today about the Chinese rating agency Dagong’s downgrade of US sovereign debt to Single-A. Chovanec says that Dagong is ‘hyper-senstive’ to US risk.

In Germany movements in GDP follow movements in the rate of expansion of exports. Let’s not get into why that is for the moment (think Germany’s particular demography), and just consider the possibility, despite all the talk over the years…