Credit Writedowns

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). We wince at congressional ineptitude but in one category…

Upon first reading what I am pasting below, my thesis councillor briskly claimed that this particular piece of text represented a malignant tumor that had to be surgically removed if the patient (in this case, my master's thesis) were to…

By Annaly Capital Management There was a heavy economic data schedule in the back half of this week. On Thursday we got Industrial Production (IP) and Capacity Utilization (Cap-U) for June, along with Philly Fed Business Conditions and…

By Marshall Auerback and Edward Harrison. Marshall's view Ed has asked me to deal specifically with the issue of Ricardian equivalence, the theorem used by anti-government proponents to argue that fiscal deficits are counterproductive and…

Most News-worthy Links Republicans don't give a damn about the deficit | Sahil Kapur | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk Paul Krugman - Redo That Voodoo - NYTimes.com Why Germany should not listen to the US | vox The Usual…

The ECRI Weekly Leading Index (WLI), a measure of future U.S. economic growth stands at 120.6 unchanged from a week ago. We first began actively talking about the WLI in April as a predictive indicator for either sustained recovery or a…

From the Consumer Metrics Institute What credit numbers? During the past week there has been a flurry of Federal Reserve reports and commentary concerning the levels of credit in the current economy. The two most notable were: On July…

Things I am Going to Think About On Vacation Like others, I try to clean off my desk before my summer vacation.  This year it is particularly difficult because there seems to be several unresolved issues.  I will mull them over…

Highlights The US dollar continues to trade heavily against the euro and yen, but it is consolidating against the other major currencies.  Poor US economic data  and more benign news streams from Europe continues to fuel the…

By Michael Pettis Since this is another long posting, it might make sense to summarize briefly its two parts.  In the first part, expanding on an Op-Ed piece of mine published by the Wall Street Journal on Monday, I argue that…