capital investment

Liberalizing interest rates means that those sectors of the economy who have benefitted from very low lending rates – SOEs, local and municipal governments, real estate developers, and other large borrowers – are likely to find many reasons…

Perceptions have certainly changed a lot in the last few months. As recently as three years ago there were so few analysts who were skeptical about the sustainability of Chinese growth that we rarely disagreed among ourselves. Now, however,…

In recent months, we have seen a precipitous drop in Chinese trade growth. This comes from both the export and the import side. What's happening? A large part of it is wages. As I indicated two years ago in a post on the Lewis Turning…

The latest data out of China will give those expecting a soft landing pause about China's economic situation. While inflation has come down somewhat of late, so too have industrial output and capital investment. This is creating EM feedback…

To try to work out what China's future economic options might be I will begin with two key assumptions. The first is that the fundamental imbalance in China is the very low GDP share of consumption. This low GDP share of consumption, I have…

The video below is from On the Edge with Max Keiser. I speak to Max during this show from 31 March about the US economy, Federal Reserve policy, financial repression and more. On the issue of financial repression, I think my view is pretty…

The Free Exchange blog at The Economist has accepted my bet, and very cleverly (the bastards!) they have added a second one. For two years I have been arguing that a Chinese rebalancing will require much slower GDP growth rates than we…

Yesterday, John Carney at CNBC had a nice little post comparing Hyman Minsky's Financial Instability Hypothesis with some of the thinking by Friedrich von Hayek behind Austrian Business Cycle Theory. John rightly points to this passage as…

Last August, the Fed went for what I call "rate easing". If the economy weakens this year what will it do? I am not convinced it will be quantitative easing. In general, I think the Fed, while looking to support the growth side of its dual…