bonds

I spoke to Tadas Viskanta of Abnormal Returns on StockTwits TV about a lot of different issues this past week. We discussed commodities, bond market, QE, tech stocks, and a lot more. Here's the video below.

The narrative has shifted recently with regards to Greece. Greece had been portrayed by many as a small economy one tenth the size of Germany whose debt problems could be solved by throwing EU/IMF money at it. Now, Greece appears to have…

Systemic risk is not driven by close macro integration. If this were the case, US states would have far higher exposure to systemic credit risk. Instead, systemic exposure is very high for European sovereigns. The roots of systemic risk lie…

On Friday I spoke to RT America about the mockery of a sham that is US public discourse on the debt ceiling issue. First of all, the US government creates dollars. They can always manufacture more if they so choose. It's a rubbish argument…

Bill Gross: Low policy rates and the increasing negative real yields that they engender as inflation accelerates represent an immediate threat to investment portfolios. Bond prices don’t necessarily have to go down for savers to get skunked…

In April 1989, Mexico's external debt negotiator, Angel Gurria, asked his country's commercial bank creditors for a 55 percent haircut. This was the opening pitch of the newly created Brady Plan, which finally addressed both the debt…

What a cruel month April has been to the peripheral debt markets. Greek 10-year yields have risen 349 bp, more than the cumulative increase over the previous 11 months. Portugal's 10-year yield has risen 180 bp this month and 190 bp over…

The claims about “unsustainable deficits” gained new urgency this week as S&P warned that it was downgrading US federal government debt from stable to negative (see here for recent debate). This appeared to be a blatantly political…

A sovereign nation that issues debt in its own fiat currency cannot default involuntarily. Again, this is the Ecuador risk factor, defaulting for purely political reasons, not because of the inability to pay. It is not clear whether there…

This is really motivated by being incredibly frustrated with what happened a couple of years ago. Obviously there was a financial crisis; that's not what frustrated me. I am one of the naysayers who was not at all surprised there was a…