Credit Writedowns

The biggest news is that the EU is already backtracking on the Euro summit deal that decoupled the sovereign-bank tie which had been causing Spanish and Italian yields to rise. And predictably, Spanish and Italian yields have risen once…

Last month, the Teranet-National Bank National Composite House Price Index showed that Canadian house price gains while moderating across the board are still robust. Combined with recent evidence of a precipitous drop in transaction volume,…

People’s Bank of China today cut the 1-year lending rate by 31 bp to 6% and the 1-year deposit rate by 25 bp to 3%. It also widened the allowable discount that commercial banks can offer on loans from 20% to 30%. This gives the PBOC rate…

Last week's newsletter focused on Monti and Rajoy forcing Europe into true EuroTARP as the chief headline coming out of the latest European summit. A lot of other commentary focused on the agreement to let the ESM/EFSF buy up sovereign…

The data today were pretty mixed. Brazil is showing more signs of slowing as industrial production there dropped for the third month in a row. What's more is that this puts Brazil back to numbers from 2009 when we were recovering from a…

Scarcity is a powerful force and it leaves those in control of limited resources wielding great power. We think a scarcity of uranium will increase Russia's power; control over some of the last big, easy oil deposits has earned Saudi Arabia…

We are staring into a cyclical downturn in the second half of this year. Behind that is a whole other set of challenges, more structural in nature, which will take years to sort out. Our American friends - except for a small but rather…

Liberalizing interest rates means that those sectors of the economy who have benefitted from very low lending rates – SOEs, local and municipal governments, real estate developers, and other large borrowers – are likely to find many reasons…

Debt deflation is taking hold in Europe. We have seen the crash in Greece's economy unfold over the last two years. And now we are witnessing similar things in Spain. As Marshall Auerback puts it, Spain is the New Greece. But now come signs…

Here's a second batch of links. I think the Bloomberg piece on Spanish banks is a big highlight here. Essentially, Bloomberg tells us that Spain may be overestimating bank profits and therefore underestimating the capital shortfall of its…