Economy

It would easy to say something like, “The euro is an abomination and the peripherals should simply leave or be tossed out of the euro zone.” But, we are here now. The political imperatives for closer European ties that created the single…

As Mr Zapatero put it on Saturday, when he announced the date of Spain’s general election, the decision “is in the country’s interest” since from now on there will be certainty, and “certainty is stability”. While it is quite possible that…

Bill Gross was on CNBC yesterday talking about the debt ceiling deal. His first thoughts were about jobs. "There are no jobs in terms of growth. There are no wages in terms of increase… This is a classic de-levering cycle.”

Unfortunately for President Obama, the economy is not doing well. And the cuts envisaged in this deal make that problem worse. From an electoral standpoint this is already becoming a problem in key swing states like Pennsylvania.

On July 13, 2011 Chairman Bernanke explained: "The reason people hold gold is protection against tail risk, really, really, bad outcomes. To the extent that the last few years have made people more worried about the potential of a major…

The bill passed the House overwhelmingly. The Senate votes today. I will be speaking about the deal on BBC World News at 100PM ET.

What does it mean that disposable income was revised down all three years, yet the savings rate was revised down in 2009 and 2010? I think it means that people were under debt stress trying to maintain lifestyles once the technical recovery…

The job cuts are principally in the United States and Europe and the job hires are in the emerging markets. This is a significant shift away from the developed economies, which are mired in a debt crisis to areas of the world which are…

While the potential still exists for manufacturing to tick back up, the jobs picture and the fiscal and monetary backdrop are not supportive of this outcome. The inflation backdrop is the best part about this picture, with that subindex…

I have been arguing for a while that as long as the Chinese government retains its capacity to raise debt we are not going to see a sharp slowdown in economic growth – at least until 2013. Any indication that the economy is slowing too…