Economy

Opinion polls and surveys are finding an increasing number of people expect one or more countries to leave the euro zone. Investors are anxious. What is to be done? What makes this so difficult is that there are so many moving parts and…

Tomorrow the central banks will auction dollars for the first time under the lower rates. There was some talk that the lower take down at this week's regular refi operation (about 13 bln less euros than were maturing from last week's…

In the aftermath of the emergence of a “reinforced ‘Stability and Growth Pact’”, Citigroup chief economist Willem Buiter is pessimistic about growth outcomes in the major developed economies because the political economy of the sovereign…

China has an interest in preventing the total collapse of the largest buyer of its exports, but it also has an interest in forcing Europe to divest its overseas assets. Chinese banks and companies are in a position to be a buyer of some of…

Italy's government has come forward with an aggressive 30 billion euro austerity package to prevent the country's bankrupcty and pave the way for the fiscal integration that Angela Merkel is pushing as the key to solving the European debt…

Here’s a good all-encompassing Bloomberg TV video with Morgan Stanley’s Stephen Roach from Friday. He is not impressed with the IMF plans that the Europeans are working on, calling the numbers “chump change”. Roach also talks about the US…

For years I have been arguing that the Achilles heel of the Chinese growth model is the unsustainable rise in debt that comes as a necessary consequence of capital misallocation fueled by bank lending. Capital misallocation, I argued, was…

News links for 3 December 2011

A breakdown of employment gains and losses by industry plus an excerpt of what the BLS had to say about this morning’s employment report

As often is the case, economic data can be a bit of a Rorschach test, in that reasonable people can see and value different aspects of the report. This holds for today's US employment report. The headlines were good--140k private sector…