bubble

The last two days have seen the latest monthly data on credit growth in Australia from the RBA, and the latest quarterly data on house prices from the ABS. Together they confirm trends that I’ve identified on numerous occasions between the…

The Chinese property market has come off the boil according to this video from NTD Television. The issues are reminiscent of the US subprime crisis in which developers, under the gun from a falling market, were forced to slash prices to…

Cornell University professor Robert Hockett explains his paper with Nouriel Roubini and Daniel Alpert on “Moving From the Post-Bubble, Post-Bust Economy to Growth”. His prescription is one part credit writedowns, one part debt rebalancing,…

We stumbled upon this interesting chart from the Financial Stability Oversight Council’s 2011 Annual report which shows the share of owner equity in household real estate. It surprised us, not so much in that it is at record lows, but that…

I see this private mending market as a bit like pay day loans in the US. The goal, however, is to get around lending restrictions imposed by the state. The lesson is clear: once bubble psychology takes over, it is difficult to dislodge it.…

The consequences of negative real interest rates and financial repression. We know how this story ends. Keep this one on your radar.

What is surprising is that over the past decade, the price rises you find for 33 commodities are just about beyond the realm of possibility—2, 3, and 4 standard deviations away from trend. It is a boom without any precedent. Quite simply,…

The overall gist of Jim Chanos' comments on Bloomberg yesterday were that China has off-balance sheet contingent liabilities due to its implicit commitment to state-owned enterprises which are kneee-deep in land and property speculation.…

This extra $4.5 trillion of household mortgage debt is a terrible burden on the economy since consumers make up over 70% of our economy. This is why consumer spending has been so tepid over the past few years. U.S. consumers spent well…

The classification of assets according to such dreary concoctions as "mid-cap growth," comparative asset benchmarks is now over.