Credit Writedowns

Last night, Japan’s GDP figures for Q3 came in much lower than expected. GDP fell an annualized 1.6% versus expectations for an annualized increase of 2.2%. This is as large a miss as you will see, and it calls into question the economic…

Japan seems to be heading deeper and deeper into a very risky experiment based on a misunderstanding about what the problem facing the country actually is.

I stole this title from the Wall Street Journal because that was takeaway #1 in their post on the 5 takeaways on eurozone GDP. It seems apt but what does it mean? For me it means that the eurozone is at stall speed, vulnerable to crashing…

The Germans are saying, “we want the euro and we want to be good European partners, but not on any terms. We will not be in a union that fosters ever-increasing levels of government debt.”

A month ago, I wrote a piece on zero rates, resource misallocation, and shale oil that warned of the potential negative impact that low oil prices could have on the funding for shale drillers and the potential contagion this drying up in…

Gavyn Davies has a column up over at the Financial Times, which I think is a masterpiece at integrating a number of threads from different economic schools of thought into a composite picture of the global economy that makes sense. His view…

The big news this morning is the US employment report. The headline numbers were all good, though the add to non-farm payrolls came in below expectations. While this was a good report, the wage-related data were disappointing. Some thoughts…

US elections Just to follow up on yesterday’s two posts, exit polling data from Tuesday confirm what I was saying about disenchantment with the U.S. economy despite the positive headlines. 58% of those casting ballots said they were…

Although I think China is clearly much more integrated as an optimal currency zone than Europe is today, it is probably less integrated than the US (I will use the US and Europe as the two extreme cases between which China falls). China of…

In my last post on what the US midterm elections mean, I wrote that the election was a referendum on the President’s leadership and that he had failed that referendum. It is not the President’s policies per se that have caused voter…