capital investment

Yesterday, I indicated that the FOMC has already considered offering unlimited quantitative easing to target specific interest rates during the second round of quantitative easing. I believe the Fed will do this in QE3, and apparently Bill…

In the US, you have a weakening recovery, uneven job growth, less accommodative monetary policy, tightening fiscal policy at the federal and local levels, austerity in Europe and tightening in emerging markets coupled with secularly high…

Raghuram Rajan, one of the few mainstream economists to warn of the US housing bubble, has recently written a piece which is highly critical of US monetary policy. His view, one that I share, is that US policy favours debtors over savers in…

If the public sector balance must over time move from around -10 percent to around -3 percent to stabilize the federal debt-to-GDP ratio at tolerable levels, then the private sector balance and the current account balance must move by…

To sum up: Non-performing loans look to be a full 10% of Chinese GDP. That’s high. The Chinese government is confronting this writedown problem head-on. While a number of analysts have opinions on the measures just taken, it is far from…

The immediate problem is the excess capital investment and the costly maintenance of the projects it has spawned. Longer-term, Asia's growth prospects look good.

What is driving the increase in the RMB-denominated trade is probably not any preference to transact in RMB but rather speculative demand for RMB. That sounds pretty plausible.

There is a difference between economic growth from mere factor mobilisation and economic growth from increased productivity. One requires a lot more capital investment and debt than the other. If and when capital investment growth slows,…

I ran across a post by Robert Murphy over at the Mises Institute blog on Modern Monetary Theory. Since I have been pushing the idea that the centrality of secular debt accumulation makes some ideas from MMT and Austrian Economics…

Unemployment insurance for 21st century in the form of a jobs program could end the malinvestment and predations of politicians and foster a strong economy. We need jobs but we must be mindful of predator state capitalism. My proposal below…