Credit Writedowns

Could this be part of the reason the Shanghai was the only major index we track that was down last week?

News links for 5 December 2011 featuring stories on Europe, the sovereign debt crisis, and shadow banks,

If I told you that the composition of an average UK equity fund changes by 90% a year, would that startle you? How would you feel if I added that the 20 funds with the highest turnover returned just 4.7% to investors in the 3 years to the…

Italy's government has come forward with an aggressive 30 billion euro austerity package to prevent the country's bankrupcty and pave the way for the fiscal integration that Angela Merkel is pushing as the key to solving the European debt…

It is apparent that adoption of a foreign currency is equivalent to running a very tight fixed exchange rate regime. It provides the least policy space of any exchange rate regime. This does not necessarily mean that it is a bad policy. But…

The US dollar is beginning the week on a softer note, but well within recent ranges. Most of this week's key events lie ahead. The day earlier than planned and somewhat larger Italian austerity plan coupled with talk of ECB purchases has…

Here’s a good all-encompassing Bloomberg TV video with Morgan Stanley’s Stephen Roach from Friday. He is not impressed with the IMF plans that the Europeans are working on, calling the numbers “chump change”. Roach also talks about the US…

News links for 4 December 2011.

The probability of a German-led fiscal union in Europe is greater than the consensus suspects given its arguments that only an ECB backstop and a European bond will prevent the end of the greater experiment. In addition, the argument is…

For years I have been arguing that the Achilles heel of the Chinese growth model is the unsustainable rise in debt that comes as a necessary consequence of capital misallocation fueled by bank lending. Capital misallocation, I argued, was…