credit cards

The US economy’s upswing over the last six years has been predicated on credit like the cycle before it because wage growth has been lacklustre. I want to describe where credit activity has created a lift in consumer spending and in capital…

I have mentioned 1994 as a benign comparison for the US economy of 2015 as opposed to the 1937 comparison Ray Dalio made recently. Having looked at reasonable worst case scenarios with 1997 Japan as a model, I want to look at upside…

This is going to be a short thought piece. But the takeaway should be that the convergence to zero will continue unabated as the threat of inflation is muted given the combination of excess capacity, high private debt and unfavourable…

No one story sticks out for me today. So I thought I would make a few comments on the stories making the rounds today in the Internet. Let’s start in the U.S.

There are no big themes dominating the news today. So it is a perfect time to hit a couple of themes with an economic and market theme approach. Let’s talk banks, Japanese trade, the currency wars and deflation.

It’s been a while since I did a multi-theme review as I used to do on Fridays but there are a number of threads out today that deserve mention. So I want to pack them into an economic and market theme post today. Market meltdown. First,…

Last week, the ECB announced that it would begin purchasing securities backed by bank lending to households and firms. Whereas markets and the media have generally greeted this announcement with enthusiasm, this column identifies reasons…

I have always thought that the soft landing/hard landing debate wholly misses the point when it comes to China’s economic prospects. It confuses the kinds of market-based adjustments we are likely to see in the US or Europe with the much…

The gist of the piece here is that, while I see a cyclical recovery that is gathering pace, the Achilles heel of the recovery from a sustainability perspective is wage growth. To the degree the Fed normalizes policy now before wage growth…

Michael Pettis has a good piece on debt and credit that I ran on the blog this morning. His thoughts on loss socialization are important not just in the context of China but also of other markets like Europe, the US, Canada and Australia…