Monetary System

Of the five, United Commercial is pretty darn big ($11.2 billion in assets) United Commercial Bank San Francisco, CA As of October 23, 2009, United Commercial Bank had total assets of $11.2 billion and total deposits of…

I was reading Kid Dynamite's account of the recent Treasury - Finance Blogger meeting after having read a bunch of others (see them all in Abnormal Returns’ Nov 4th links). And I was struck by his characterization of the thinking at…

That’s all you need to know. Source FOMC statement – Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System

I have said on a number of occasions that a sovereign nation that issues debt in its own fiat currency cannot default involuntarily.  The case most people point to as a counterfactual is Russia in 1998.  I mentioned Russia in a…

The following is a re-print of the latest monthly newsletter from Niels Jensen of Absolute Return Partners, published with the express permission of the author. Visit www.arpllp.com to learn more about Absolute Return Partners. You can…

Several notable economists prognosticated on what Japan should do to get out of their malaise in the 1990s but none of them understood the problem or the options available to the sovereign government. They all gave poor advice. The way…

When I read Ed’s recent piece “Japan: stimulus without reform leads to a policy cul de sac,” I couldn’t help but think he is wrong about Japan. Supporting aggregate demand The problem is taxes. In Japan, taxes are too high relative to the…

Nils Pratley’s piece at the Guardian on RBS and Lloyds is very good.  Two quotes sum up the situation quite well. First,regarding Lloyds, Pratley says: Royal Bank of Scotland's shares down almost 20% in two days; Lloyds's shares…

Lloyds are looking to avoid the embrace of government by going to existing shareholders to raise capital and sidestep the draconian break-up solution foisted upon RBS by Neelie Kroes. According to Bloomberg, this is the largest rights issue…

At the weekend I wrote about Alistair Darling’s about-face on breaking up to big to fail financial institutions. Apparently, this was not a case of labour changing tack and finding regulatory religion, but rather of the European Union…