Economy

So here’s the deal. What happened is that the financial sector taken as a whole moved into extremely short-term finance of positions in assets. This is a huge topic and is related to the transformation of investment banking partnerships…

Banking sectors in both countries are highly concentrated. The top four banks in Australia account for about three quarters of the banking assets. The top six Canadian banks account for upwards of 90% of the Canadian banking assets.…

the banks now browbeat governments – not by having ready cash but by threatening to go bust and drag the economy down with them if they are not given control of public tax policy, spending and planning. The process has gone furthest in the…

This report is disturbing because of how the headline number masks real and troubling weakness in the more substantive details. Hopefully anyone trying to engineer the economy is basing their tinkering on better information than that…

Stephen Roach says the Fed is going all in in support of QE and I agree. But what else are they going to do? Look at Europe, for example. The ECB there has a hydra-headed problem with sovereigns and banks on the brink of insolvency and they…

This is a sing along in honor of the US Treasury Secretary.

I had a bet with a bunch of fellow market watchers back in early 2010 when Geithner was getting it from all sides as to how long he would last. Some people were saying he couldn't make it through the second year. Geithner outlasted…

I am glad to say that the overinvestment thesis is much more widely acknowledged today than it was even two or three years ago, but one myth, I think, is that most of the overinvestment excesses in China are concentrated in the real estate…

Roubini said that the "probability of a recession in the United States is lower than 60 percent right now." On Europe, he said that even if an agreement is reached on Greece, "there are going to be so many holdouts that then they’ll have a…

This is a great chart below via the Wall Street Journal. It shows the total debt to GDP ratios for the largest developed economies in the world broken down into four sectors: households, non-financial corporations, financial institutions…