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The Wall Street Journal's Matt Phillips describes the turmoil in European sovereign bond markets. He says some traders tell him that they now consider countries like France a part of the periphery and are pricing it as such. This risk-off…

"Yesterday, the headline in the Frankfurter Zeitung was “Democracy is Junk.” The meaning was the financial sector was saying that democracy is incompatible with collecting debts and, when debtors can’t pay, with foreclosing on the public…

An excerpt from "The World In Depression" by Charles P. Kindleberger

Central European borrowers loaded up on cheap Swiss franc and euro loans (mainly from Austria and Switzerland) in the lead up to the credit crisis because of higher nominal rates in central Europe. When the crisis hit, these loans became…

I see this private mending market as a bit like pay day loans in the US. The goal, however, is to get around lending restrictions imposed by the state. The lesson is clear: once bubble psychology takes over, it is difficult to dislodge it.…

This column comments on Joe Nocera’s September 23, 2011 column entitled: The Phony Solyndra Scandal. Nocera’s column compares the statements of Solyndra’s controlling managers to Dick Fuld’s statements to the public about Lehman’s…

The consequences of negative real interest rates and financial repression. We know how this story ends. Keep this one on your radar.

The question after the frightful period in 1907 was what to do to prevent another panic from causing a severe depression. Benjamin Strong, a senior executive at Bankers Trust and later the first President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New…

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…

Gary Shilling sees a hard landing in China as they try to deal with the bad debt problem there. But note, when he says 'hard landing', he says this would "knock their growth rate in half." That's still almost 5% annualised GDP growth. Video…