credit cards

Stephen Roach doesn’t mince words.  He calls monetary policy during the bubble years “reckless and irresponsible” and he thinks politics is thwarting any meaningful regulatory reform, a view I also hold. I think the point of Roach’s…

Say I'm a politician and I am concerned about my re-election prospects in 2010.  I have been a member of Congress for seven years now and have developed a good reputation as a reform-minded economic realist willing to listen to a…

It has been my thesis for some time that we are seeing a secular change in consumption patterns in the United States.  This will have grave implications for a world economy used to seeing the American consumer as an economic growth engine…

I have been taking a bit of a break as my trip to the Ontario’s Lake Country winds down.  It’s a beautiful place.  But, as Marshall Auerback and I were lamenting, it has become the Hamptons of Canada as everyone from Toronto is up…

In late June, I posted two items China’s present growth story is built on malinvestment and Chinese stock market bubble inflating, on the building bubble in Chinese lending and asset markets.  The crux of the posts was that China, in its…

This is my translation of an article from Dagens Nyheter, a Swedish daily. Swedish banks are planning to write down Latvian personal loans by 10 percent. However, the proposal includes only a small part of the Latvia’s mountain of debt.…

This comes from Reuters: Fallout from a still deteriorating housing market caused the rate of consumer loan payments at least 30 days late to rise to 3.23 percent in the January-to-March period from 3.22 percent in the 2008 fourth…

Peterson is the former Nixon cabinet secretary and founder of the Blackstone Group. He is also a well-known deficit hawk and founder of the Peterson Foundation.  He recently wrote his autobiography, “The Education of an American…

I think a technical recovery will happen in the Q4 to Q1 timeframe.  But this recovery is likely to be weak, if it happens at all.  Downside risk remains. Unfortunately, the Obama administration has fired all its bullets, spending…

Credit is still tight despite the low Libor rates and other signs that market stress has died down. Case and point is an item I ran across on the Norwegian site E24. Apparently, Amsterdam is losing revenue as its prostitutes in the red…