capital investment

As I see it, Japan’s problem was that during the 1980s it was so addicted to investment-led growth and artificially cheap financing that it misallocated capital on a massive scale and failed to include the resulting implicit losses in its…

Andy Lees takes a sceptical view of fiat currency and the excess credit it has created over the past forty years and uses a few charts to demonstrate his points.

I have been arguing for a while that as long as the Chinese government retains its capacity to raise debt we are not going to see a sharp slowdown in economic growth – at least until 2013. Any indication that the economy is slowing too…

Economic growth warning signs are evident all around in recent data from the US, Europe and China. This should mean negative earnings surprises by Q3 earnings season.

It is not clear that there is a political consensus for a stand-alone tax holiday. There may be support for the stand-alone tax holiday as part of a larger corporate tax reform effort. If it is enacted, job growth and capital investment is…

A lot of Chinese SOEs are involved in a very wide variety of business activities, and are especially fond of activities in which cheap capital is the comparative advantage, or in which there is political advantage to be gained. That makes…

Hoenig, like many Fed leaders from the Reserve banks outside of Washington and the money centers in New York, Boston and San Francisco, is more comfortable with safe and boring banking than the higher risk model that brought the global…

Politically, the whole thing looks a lot like Japan. To my mind, the right approach then is to de-emphasize “increasing... borrowing and lending” and re-emphasize increasing jobs and employment. Whether we see work sharing as we see in the…

Rather than adding stimulus with the aim of goosing demand to help the economy reach escape velocity, I would say that the central objective of economic policy is to help the economy reach full employment. Doing so will increase demand,…