capital investment

Here is the heart of the matter. It is not the motivation to make money that makes people efficient with resources. It is having a single clearly-defined purpose. When objectives are unclear, money is inevitably wasted.

I got a lot of feedback from my January 5 blog entry because of my argument that the implementation of the reforms proposed in the Third Plenum all but guarantees that growth rates in China will slow down. For that reason I thought it might…

China is a big wildcard for 2014. Growth slowed last year to a 14-year low. It isn’t yet clear if the trend will continue and what China’s leadership will do if growth does slow further.

Abenomics is one of the most aggressive economic experiments we have witnessed in the post-Marshall Plan developed world. The questions is whether the massive stimulus campaign can work when politically there will always be discomfort with…

When I last wrote you I was talking about 2013 as being akin to the mid-cycle tightening year of 1994. In this view, we are well into a business cycle but it is far from over because of cyclical agents could spur the cycle on. But what…

Solving Germany's investment problem requires both low interest rates and increased government investment. The ECB is at least attempting to address the first of these. But when is the German government going to accept its responsibility…

An increase in government borrowing to fund medium-term investment is not going to result in out-of-control inflation. But failure of capital investment due to an out-of-control capital account deficit will in the end impoverish Germany.

My contention has been that global growth is accelerating. Backing that up, yesterday I looked at four economies where growth has been good. Only in Sweden were we seeing renewed weakness. Today, I want to look at four economies where…

I am not a bull, largely because I have concerns about the long-term sustainability of today’s policy mix in Europe and the United States and the rise in equity multiples. But it is undeniable that we are seeing a more bullish outlook for…

So much has been written about the endogeneity of money that I thought it was now widely accepted. But recent exchanges have shown me that people STILL aren't getting it. Most recently, there have been two themes doing the rounds that…