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Quick post here to continue the theme of Christine Lagarde doing a complete makeover of the IMF. Yesterday, the Financial Times reported on an IMF staff paper that accepted capital controls as a necessary evil in specific cases, a sharp…

Yesterday the ISM Manufacturing Report on Business came out and it showed a large decline in the US manufacturing sector. The headline PMI number of 49.5% means that the US manufacturing sector is below the 50% threshold that separates…

 If you look at the recent economic data coming out of China, it is clear the economy is in a bottoming process. The question is whether the measures used to keep the economy from sliding further are sustainable. The most recent piece of…

Jeremy Grantham's quarterly piece is out now and the important topic is the lack of growth in the US. The way that Grantham paints the picture - and I believe this is an accurate depiction - the US is not just suffering from a cyclical…

Last month I wrote a weekly post on the technology industry noting that the paradigm shift to cloud computing is in full swing. The most important facet of cloud computing in terms of business model disruption is its effects on platform…

I am still in vacation mode but I will start to post a lot more thematic content over the next two weeks. This post will concentrate on the mobile handset market and is based largely on a recent market analysis by Gartner. Earlier in the…

A few weeks ago, I postulated that Christine Lagarde was increasingly moving the IMF away from its position as 'enforcer' of orthodox neoclassical economic policy. I backed this up with three specific ways in which the IMF was becoming a…

Note: I am going to be playing catch up here for a while since I have been away from my computer for most of the week. So this is the first in a series of post reviewing what the US political elections mean for the economy and markets. I…

Earlier this week I noticed that Apple was able to wrest back some market share from Google in the mobile platform race. CNet showed Apple's iOS platform going from only 21.5% market share a year ago to 35.7% in the 12-week period through…

A reader asked me to comment on a video from the Big Picture conference of Jim Bianco commenting on the so-called wealth effect of quantitative easing. In the video, Jim takes the position that the Fed cannot create permanent wealth though…