Credit Writedowns

The Absolute Return Letter, November 2014 “The single most robust and striking fact about cross-national growth is regression to the mean.” -Lawrence Summers and Lant Pritchett Low growth is printed on the wall When financial markets…

The US mid-term elections have just ended as a major victory for the Republican Party. And while I don’t do politics, being in DC affords me a front row seat to what’s going on. Below is my take on what happened, why and what it means for…

A couple of weeks ago I told you about two properties in London that I was familiar with as background for my post on house price inflation in the UK. What was clear from those two examples and dozens of others I found is that rental yields…

House price fluctuations take centre stage in recent macroeconomic debates, but little is known about their long-run evolution. This column presents new house price indices for 14 advanced economies since 1870. Real house prices display a…

This is going to be a relatively short note focused on what is going on in Japan because of the news that Japan has ramped up its program of quantitative easing to new heights. Coming on the heels of the US Federal Reserve’s announcement…

The GDP and jobless claims numbers for the U.S. came out today and they confirm the continued solid pace of recovery that has taken shape since Q2 began. GDP growth came in at a 3.5% annualized and initial jobless claims were 287,000,…

I have a lot of threads to cover today. So let’s get right into it. New home sales. I want to start in the US first because the macro data backdrop is good. The first piece of data here is actually a bit soft and says that residential…

By Marc Chandler Drivers for the Week Ahead - This will be a busy week between stress tests and data releases, which markets have taken as positively- Market expectations have settled down, and the Fed is widely expected to announce the…

I have three areas I want to explore today: earnings reports, China and Europe. The earnings reports are mixed but generally good enough to support continued job growth and economic momentum through this fourth quarter. I also want to deep…

Yesterday, I saw a couple of stories about a sell off in luxury flats in London. The gist was that luxury homes in central London had corrected as much as 20% in the last year. The decline is severe and Foxtons, the estate agent, has been…