capital investment

Below is a video interview Larry Summers conducted with Bloomberg Television. We provide the partial transcript without comment, courtesy of Bloomberg Television.

The German-language media have been voicing concerns over the ECB’s low interest-rate policy and its effect on savings and investment in the euro zone. This makes sense given the state of the economy in Germany and Austria is significantly…

debt matters, even if it is possible to pretend for many years that it doesn’t (and this pretense was made possible by the implicit capitalization of debt-servicing costs). Japan never really wrote down all or even most of its investment…

I've suggested previously that QE could actually be deflationary. I looked at it from several perspectives - collateral effects, the monetary transmission mechanism, distributive effects, even Peter Stella's "deadwood" inhibiting bank…

Recently, I wrote a series of posts predicting that the Fed would give up on QE and move toward forward guidance in order to be able to normalize policy. Nevertheless, I have also been saying for quite some time I believe the US zero rate…

Five or six years ago, a few skeptics first started pointing out that the credit dynamics underlying Chinese growth was creating an unsustainable increase in debt. This, they warned, would ultimately undermine the banking system and cause…

Just after I posted today, I ran across two posts from March that I wrote on government and private debt that are related to theme of today's commentary on potential housing bubbles in Germany and Sweden. I am writing here to more tightly…

"Not all government debt is created equal. We have bad deficits and good deficits. Good deficits are used to fund investments that will have a positive rate of return, properly determined. Those contribute to GDP."

It is still too early for all of these predictions either to have materialized or to have failed, but I thought it might be useful to review them to see whether or not they have been reasonably accurate in describing unfolding events and,…

As analysts and official entities like the World Bank continue to downgrade their forecasts for medium-term growth in China, I have been asked increasingly often for the reasons I believe that 3-4% average annual growth rates is likely to…