Credit Writedowns

The IMF has told Portugal that the draconian austerity budget it has passed for 2013 will not be enough a nd has asked for more austerity. Portugal needs to make up a 4 billion euro gap and to do so the IMF wants to see cuts to government…

Back in October of last year the Irish Finance Minister Michael Noonan said that his government's goal is to be able to complete the three-year Troika bailout on time and resume normal operation late in 2013. Now that Ireland has regained…

The Terrifying Danger of the Trillion Dollar Coin "The bottom line is that the Trillion Dollar Coin removes profit the financial system makes on the interest payments to holders of  the Treasuries - this reduces the cost to government (and…

As we face another brutal fight over the federal debt ceiling at a time when the economy still remains fragile, the stock market is oddly complacent. Even if the debt ceiling crisis is resolved, the result would be some combination of…

The November US trade deficit widened sharply and this will likely prompt economists to cut estimates of Q4 GDP. The first estimate is to be released at the end of the month. The pace of growth had appeared to be about half the pace of…

This morning, the Spanish government initiated its bond auction process this year. The auctions were a success with the yield on 10-year government bonds falling to 4.95%, below 5% for the first time since March 2012.

North America Letting the payroll tax cut expire was a terrible idea; extent of terribleness unclear | FT Alphaville "While workers intended to spend 10 to 18 percent of their tax-cut income, they reported actually spending 28 to 43…

In yesterday's links, I pointed to two links showing that Ireland had regained bond market access. Here is more evidence that Ireland is regaining bond market access.

Last year, I started my weekly newsletter out with Ten Surprises for 2012. The goal was to give you a list of things that investors only assigned one in three odds of occuring that I believed had a fifty percent or better chance of…

The Dutch-language press in Belgium is reporting that belgium experienced a 3.1% decline in apartment prices nationwide, largely because of weakness in the Dutch-speaking region of Flanders.