Political Economy

David Rosenberg thinks the unemployment rate is headed much higher than anyone anticipates.  If you recall, back in January when the stimulus package was crafted, the Obama Administration felt that passing the bill would mean an…

Andy Xie thinks the Fed is on an inflationary path.  Last month, he wrote an article in Caijing which says that ‘stagflation lite’ is the Federal Reserve’s preferred outcome. What’s interesting is his recent article about the need for…

In the wake of a few significant elections in the American states of New York, New Jersey and Virginia, a lot of pundits are putting their spin on what these elections mean for Barack Obama and his political agenda. On the whole, I find…

For those of us interested in seeing more robust and knowledgeable regulators in government service, the recent news that Rick Bookstaber is joining the SEC is quite welcome. While I disagree vigorously with much of recent economic policy,…

The Canadian daily National Post has a good piece out today that highlights how the ‘Buy American’ provision is being seen in Canada.  Many see it as an affront that America could and would favor domestic firms over those of its…

China on Friday accused the US of protectionist and biased trade policies less than a week before president Barack Obama’s first visit to Beijing. In a stinging rebuke to Washington, China’s commerce ministry promised to take…

In my recent post about the capture of the Obama Administration by the financial services lobby, I said it was irrelevant whether they were deliberately looking to line the pockets of the banking industry. This is an important point as you…

The Obama Administration is captured. To understand why it has acted as it has, one doesn’t have to take the view that its efforts to save the banking industry were a deliberate attempt to line bankers’ pockets by transferring money from…

I have been reading press accounts of the GM decision to back out of the Opel/Vauxhall sale to the Magna/Sberbank consortium from various countries. There are a lot of different perspectives on this event in the U.S., Belgium, Spain,…

Fitch, the credit rating agency, has just downgraded the sovereign debt ratings for the Republic of Ireland from AA+ to AA-.  That is two notches and is proof-positive that the ratings agencies are worried about the hole in Dublin’s…