credit cards

As James Galbraith has argued, the problem is said to be no more serious than some clogged plumbing. A bit of Drano in the form of government handouts and guarantees should be sufficient to get credit flowing again. Nonsense. Private debt…

One of the key premises underpinning the establishment of the Euro as a common currency to be shared by a number of individual national states rather than one single nation was the central idea that the several economies of the…

LURING THE UNSOPHISTICATED into the stock market was considered a risk by Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan in 1994. So much so, that protecting the individual investor was a mandate of the Fed. (The Fed advertises and then omits new…

Over the last three decades the US financial sector has grown six times faster than nominal GDP. This column argues that there comes a point when the financial sector has a negative effect on growth – that is, when credit to the private…

You have seen a few of these videos on ghost malls and ghost cities in China. This one from an Australian broadcast is quite good. It reinforces what I have been saying about the magnitude of non-performing loans and how this constrains…

On Saturday I wrote about the Scylla and Charybdis of anchoring inflation expectations, geared toward developed economies in North America and Europe. You tighten too aggressively and you get unwanted disinflation or deflation. You remain…

By Marc Chandler A disproportionate amount of mind share has been devoted to the financial aspects of the crisis. Investors and policy makers alike may be distracted by this over-emphasis and thus leaving them vulnerable to other aspects…

Since the financial crisis hit in 2008, excess reserves have piled up in the U.S. financial system. There were almost no excess reserves in the system during the period of recorded data from 1959 onwards. But after the post-Lehman…

By Win Thin Brazil loan growth continues to pick up and it belies the notion that macroprudential measures are having any discernible effect on the economy. Total loans rose 1.4% m/m in February vs. 0.5% m/m in January, bringing the y/y…

The correct way to look at the causes of trade imbalances, in my opinion, is to look at policies that force up or down the savings rate, or the consumption rate (which is more or less the same thing since total savings is simply total…