Credit Writedowns

by Annaly Capital Management A quick follow up to our recent post on the Great Bond Bubble Debate , which was kicked off by an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal by Jeremy Siegel and Jeremy Schwartz. The seductiveness of the Jeremys’…

Jobless claims have been quite elevated of late, averaging around 450-480,000 for the past few months. While these are worrying figures, they do not in and of themselves point to recession. In my last post I used a chart of the year-on-year…

Topic of the Day: Cuba Fidel: 'Cuban Model Doesn't Even Work For Us Anymore' - International - The Atlantic Castro: I Was Wrong During Cuban Missile Crisis - International - The Atlantic Fidel to Ahmadinejad: 'Stop Slandering…

Seventy years ago next month, Winston Churchill described Soviet foreign policy as a “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”. That now may be apropos of the Japanese yen. Japan is a country that appears to be literally in decline.…

Frederick Sheehan is the author of Panderer to Power: The Untold Story of How Alan Greenspan Enriched Wall Street and Left a Legacy of Recession (McGraw-Hill, 2009). Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, is defaulting; Half Moon Bay, California, is…

Highlights The US dollar is firm against the safe-haven yen and Swiss franc but is winding down the week on a softer note against the euro, sterling and the dollar-bloc currencies. Most emerging market currencies are firmer too in an…

by Comstock Partners For some time it has been our view that the recent recession, unlike all other post-war recessions, was caused by a credit crisis, and that it would therefore be followed by a series of weak recoveries and frequent…

I tend to put a lot of stock in jobless claims as a coincident (real-time) indicator of the economic scene. My reasoning here is fairly simple. Household spending makes up 70% of the economy. Households are dependent on labour wages for the…

The following is a post by James K. Galbraith as originally published this Monday at the New America Foundation's website. In July 2008, in a memorandum for the Obama campaign team and later published in Challenge,  I wrote as…

Norway's government pension funds is the second largest sovereign wealth funds in the world with around $450 bln under management. Abu Dhabi is thought to have the largest sovereign wealth fund. The finance minister indicated that it has…