credit cards

This is a silver level post asking to what degree the US recovery is fuelled by household sector releveraging.

If and when the demand for credit increases, so too will the money supply.

Clearly, economic policy is now far more complex than it appeared to be before the GFC. As we enter this Age of Deleveraging, the worst thing we can do is apply policies that appeared to work during the preceding Age of Leverage—but were in…

the banks now browbeat governments – not by having ready cash but by threatening to go bust and drag the economy down with them if they are not given control of public tax policy, spending and planning. The process has gone furthest in the…

Stephen Roach says the Fed is going all in in support of QE and I agree. But what else are they going to do? Look at Europe, for example. The ECB there has a hydra-headed problem with sovereigns and banks on the brink of insolvency and they…

My last weekly said the hand-in-hand Fed activism and fiscal activism via Obama's mortgage proposal is bullish. Let me add a bit of colour here.

Investors must still be worried about the fallout from the European meltdown. However, the situation in the US is looking much better than it did last week because of this aggressive policy response.

I am glad to say that the overinvestment thesis is much more widely acknowledged today than it was even two or three years ago, but one myth, I think, is that most of the overinvestment excesses in China are concentrated in the real estate…

So why are these big name retailers suing the big banks. It's this chart that appears to be the smoking gun. Credit card interchange fees are the highest by a large margin. Clearly those charges that go into the bank and credit card…

Central Banks, whenever they buy any asset create new reserves. Commercial banks and people do NOT have the capacity to destroy those reserves. Once the Fed or ECB wires the money or creates that asset line item on its spreadsheet, there is…