credit

Bill White, formerly of the BIS and now with the OECD spoke to Bloomberg News during the KC Fed's annual meeting in Jackson Hole, WY. He gave some rather pointed answers to questions about the Federal Reserve's monetary policy. I reviewed…

Watching the TV news here is Spain at the moment is often a rather discomforting and sad affair. The normal menu seems to consist of a constant stream of ministers who have to appear before the cameras and the public to explain something…

Well, before we go any further, I would like to make clear that what I am going to talk about in this post is not anything illegal, or even irregular (things like this must be going on in almost all Euro Area countries even as I write).…

In a recent post on the money multiplier, a reader Luis Enrique asked about bank lending and capital constraints. Anecdotally, much of the reduction in credit is supply-constrained as well as demand-constrained. That means it's a matter of…

Editor's Note: Do not confuse the use of the term 'loanable funds' used here with the theory of loanable funds which implies government spending crowds out private spending because of a limited pool of 'loanable funds' in an economy. The…

By Edward Hugh Look, if there is one simple chart which sums up everything that is wrong with current thinking at the International Monetary Fund, then it is this one. Basically, I spent much of the day yesterday scratching my head,…

Marshall Auerback here. Our Treasury Secretary has conceded that it is still a “tough economy” for most Americans, and warned it’s possible the unemployment rate will go up for a couple of months before it comes down. Given the…

By Michael Pettis In the past few weeks I have been getting a lot of questions about serial sovereign defaults and how to predict which countries will or won’t suspend debt payments or otherwise get into trouble.  The most common…

Topic of the day: German economic policy Tyler Cowen -.Economic View - What Germany Has Learned About Debt - NYTimes.com This Op-Ed in the New York Times echoes some themes I laid out in "Lessons We Can Learn On How Stimulus And…

By John Mauldin. I have been writing about The End Game for some time now. And writing a book of the same title. Consequently, I have been thinking a lot about how the credit crisis evolved into the sovereign debt crisis, and how it all…