austerity

Quick post here. Apple's sales estimates were downgraded, as I posted yesterday. The reason for the downgrade was channel and supplier checks which revealed lower sales volume than initially believed. Apparently, Apple has told suppliers to…

According to recent estimates by Goldman Sachs, the US economy is already at stall speed, with GDP growth for Q4 expected to be an anemic 1%. Any further cuts to growth beyond this due to the fiscal cliff in 2013 would cause a recession.…

Quick post here to continue the theme of Christine Lagarde doing a complete makeover of the IMF. Yesterday, the Financial Times reported on an IMF staff paper that accepted capital controls as a necessary evil in specific cases, a sharp…

This weekly is a follow-up post to the daily I wrote on Greece earlier in the week. As I indicated then, my position on Greece has always been that eurozone leaders would be loathe to 'kicking Greece out of the euro zone". The talk of a…

In February, I penned a piece on how and why Greece will exit the eurozone since there seemed to be so much chatter about the coming Grexit. However, as I have said in the past, a Grexit will not happen any time soon. I strongly believe…

As I wrote yesterday, government deficits are the biggest driver of elevated corporate margins. This is significant in the US given the looming fiscal cliff and the already ongoing margin mean reversion. Using the financial sectoral…

Mired in the worst recession since the 1970s, Portugal's governing coalition is going to turn up the austerity dial even higher. The goal is to reduce the Portuguese deficit to 4.5% of GDP in 2013 in order to be in a position to switch out…

Now, we come to the Spanish budget. The austerity here is a lot more real than it is in the French budget. As I have been saying for a number of weeks, the goal of the Spanish government is to present an austerity budget that gets approval…

I note that several of the policy mistakes listed above date back to the same period, namely the late 1990s. Not only does it demonstrate the gung-ho approach of the time, but it also goes to show that policy mistakes do not necessarily…

By Marshall Auerback There appears to be an emerging consensus that the euro will survive, especially now that Mario Draghi has apparently grasped the nettle and persuaded his colleagues that the ECB is prepared to initiate unlimited…