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Australian property market is seeing transaction volume fall. Preliminary Melbourne sales data for 2012 from the Real Estate Institute of Victoria says that 69,000 home sales were registered last year. While that is a fall of only 3,000…

A good article in the Spanish-language Actibva reviews what to expect from the Spanish government regarding debt and deficits in 2013. I can't speak to the predictive ability here but the article is good at a minimum for its highlighting of…

I have heard a lot of doomsday predictions regarding Japan over the last twenty years. None of them have panned out as yet. This year, we are hearing a lot more as a result of the Japanese Central Bank's intention of 'monetizing' the…

The French housing market transaction volume declined by 25% last year, according to Century21. The fall in the French housing market is just beginning. And given the macro problems in France and the previous run up in house prices, the…

Spain had an estimated 350 billion euros of debt that it needed to roll over in the three years from 2011 according to analysts at Brockhouse Capital. Add in the likely need to fund regional government deficits and rollovers as well as the…

The Spanish bank run caused by redenomination risk is over. And Spanish bond yields are now back to around the 5% level today. Apparently, the ECB's monetisation scheme has worked - and without Spain's having entered a Troika program yet…

A lot has been made of so-called Abenomics after comments in Japan about forcing the central bank to set and defend a 2% inflation target. Getting a consolidated government balance sheet from a fiscal and monetary agent working hand-in-hand…

According to the Financial Times, the Australian mining group Fortescue has moved into expansion mode on the back of robust iron-ore prices that are now at an eight-month high. The reason for the rebound is the reflation efforts of the…

Until just recently, Germany was more indebted than Spain. The country was the first, along with France, to breach the Maastricht Treaty's 3% hurdle for annual deficits in 2005, prompting a change in the rules. And Germany has also been in…

The weekly post on Monday was on the new Japanese LDP Prime Minister Abe's threat to strip the Bank of Japan of its independence as a central bank. The thrust of his threat goes to  the integration of monetary and fiscal policy to create a…