Credit Writedowns

Major advanced economies have made mixed progress in repairing the private sector’s balance sheets. This column explores private sector deleveraging trends and calls for a set of policies that will return debt to safer levels. Monetary…

Greece has reached the end of the line. Its debt repayment schedule is so large in early June that it will definitely run out of money without a deal. And judging from the latest negotiations, a deal that is mutually agreeable is not on the…

By Frances Coppola This, my third post on Latvia, looks at its recovery from the 2008-9 recession. Latvia is often held up as the "poster child" for harsh austerity measures as the means of returning to strong economic growth. In…

So where did they get the money? It's an all too familiar story. Inflows of foreign capital, mainly from Scandinavian banks, attracted by low interest rates and a population hungry for credit - credit advanced, of course, against…

Over the past couple of years, there has been a decent amount of chatter about the Fed’s not being able to ‘reload’ in order to have enough tools to deal effectively with the next cyclical trough. And while the fear of running out of runway…

Introducing a currency in parallel to the euro could help Greece repay its external debt and resume economic activity. This second column in a two-part series evaluates the different options and their effects on aggregate demand and fiscal…

To prevent it from defaulting on its debt, the Greek government might need to introduce a new domestic currency, in parallel to the euro. This column, the first in a two-part series, compares the current proposals for a parallel currency…

In the 2008-9 crisis, Latvia suffered more than any other country despite its extensive bank reforms after the 1995 crisis. Yet only one of its banks failed (Parex): the rest were bailed out by their foreign owners. So the question is, if…

It is now clear that Greece’s economy has been going backwards over the last 6 months, and that it has once more fallen back into recession. Greek GDP fell by 0.4% in the last three month of 2014, and by a further 0.2% in the Jan – March…

By Michael Pettis Last week Derek Scissors, a think tank analysts at the American Enterprise Institute, published an article in which he referred to an October, 2014, studyby Credit Suisse that attempts to measure total household wealth by…