bubble

The interesting thing about the chart below is that the maximum rate of property price increases in the Netherlands was just after the euro was introduced when year-on-year prices rose a staggering 20%. Since that time the trend has been…

Many are unaware of this but there is an housing bubble and bust cycle ongoing right now in the euro zone core. I'm talking about the Netherlands, of course. Prices are now back to levels last seen in 2004 and still dropping. The problem in…

By Sober Look As an example of how frothy fixed income markets have become, Reynolds did a $3.25 billion HY issuance today. They repaid a great deal of existing debt, but also took half a billion of cash for general purposes - in effect…

The accelerating decline of Dutch house prices puts the Netherlands into a group with the US, the UK, Spain, Ireland and the Baltics that have seen housing bubbles pop as a result of the Great Financial Crisis. Dutch house prices are now at…

I don't think China or Australia is falling out of bed yet but the situation is clearly deteriorating in both countries. A lot of pundits have begun to question the official statistics out of China, especially given the weak electricity…

I want to concentrate on the popped Web 2.0 bubble in the wake of Groupon's earnings and subsequent share price slide. Web 2.0 is for real. I know that may be a strange way to start a post on Groupon and the Web 2.0 IPO bubble but it's…

Robert Shiller sees telltale signs of new bubbles forming in some of the former bubble markets. He mentions Phoenix and San Francisco as two notables.

Frederick J. Sheehan is the author of (McGraw-Hill, 2009) and "The Coming Collapse of the Municipal Bond Market" (Aucontrarian.com, 2009) The July 25, 2012, tribute to Barton Biggs received a large response. Biggs was obviously…

Barton Biggs (1932-2012) will be remembered by most of us for the words he wrote as strategist at Morgan Stanley. He worked at the firm for 30-odd years. He did not waver in his dismissal of Internet bubble promoters. At the same time,…

I don’t want to be too glib here. I recognize that policymakers are in an extremely difficult position and that there is no longer any easy solution, but railing at the markets rather than trying to understand why they are doing what they…