bonds

Last night, I posted a video of Robert Shapiro warning that the EU needed to address its banking crisis promptly and thoroughly. I agree 100%. I also mentioned a New York Times piece I wrote on Wednesday. I had anticipated my NY Times…

The bottom line is this: Forget about Meredith Whitney. State and municipal governments are carrying a load in operating and pension costs that cannot be sustained through downturns in a secular bear market as the US population ages. These…

The media and some pseudo-analysts, and, surprisingly, even some investors, still don’t understand what the 21 percent haircut in the Greece bond restructuring is all about. The 21 percent touted about is simply the hypothetical…

All US government obligations are substantially identical promises to repay a specific amount of the currency unit of account backed by nothing but taxing authority. So, Treasury bonds don’t ‘fund’ anything. If the Treasury were allowed to…

Now the market must contend with three macro bears: 1) how much and how Asia slows; 2) the Eurozone debt crisis; and 3) the slowing U.S. economy and employment/political problem. Continued volatility and 1101, 1101, 1101 on the…

On how the expectations theory of interest rates explains why debt-induced depressions are fundamentally deflationary in nature.

Here’s a great chart just released by the International Monetary Fund for Greece, Portugal, and Ireland as well as Japan, the US and the UK. Note that almost half of the US federal government debt is held by the Federal Reserve and the…

As Treasury bond yields tumble to record lows we’re hearing lots of talk the U.S. is following the economic trajectory of Japan. Not so fast! Take a look at the following chart.

Economists are telling us that the economy is decelerating rather quickly. What does that mean for stocks, in either a recession or no-recession scenario? Jim Bianco was on Bloomberg Television yesterday with some insightful comments about…

It is high time politicians in Berlin to started to recognise that fiscal austerity is not the be all and end all of the policy issues they now face. Ireland is applying fiscal austerity, but this alone may well not be enough. A better…