Credit Writedowns

News links for 15 February 2013

When massive private and public sector debts result in a credit collapse and recession, the efforts to pare down the debt is deflationary. Measures to inflate our way out of the situation are likely to fail as households are attempting to…

News links for 14 February 2013

The European Union released figures for Q4 2012 GDP today and they were awful. GDP fell by 0.6% in the euro zone and 0.5% in the entire EU. Stock markets are getting clobbered on the news and the euro is selling off. This is not unexpected…

I’ll be watching a number of things in 2013 in order to get a better sense of what the future will bring. On January 22 Princeton University Press will be publishing my book, The Great Rebalancing: Trade, Conflict, and the Perilous Road…

In November, soon after France and Belgium were forced to pump another 5.5 billion euros into bailed out lender Dexia, the ratings agency Moody's stripped France of its AAA sovereign debt rating. The interesting bit was that Moody's…

While the well-respected Internet blog TechCrunch focused on the Apple/Samsung story in analysing the data from Gartner's latest survey on the mobile market, the real news was elsewhere. The BBC got it right in trumpeting that "mobile phone…

Of all of the elements of the US fiscal cliff, the most damaging from a consumer perspective is likely to be the increase in payroll taxes as it hits a broad swathe of consumers in the middle class. This was confirmed today via the release…

Akira Amrai, Japan's economic minister, announced: "It will be important to show our mettle and see the Nikkei reach the 13,000 mark by the end of the fiscal year (March 31)... We want to continue taking (new) steps to help stock prices…

News links for 13 February 2013