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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…

There is a legal concept called "odious debts." It can be traced back more than a century. The US helped create a precedent for it by denying Cuba's responsibility for the debt incurred under Spanish colonial rule. The concept took on…

The last post was an attempt to describe a reasonable worse case scenario for the US real economy as relatively benign compared to 1937, a comparison making the rounds these days due to a piece by Bridgewater’s Ray Dalio. My point is that…

The title of this post is a bit alarmist. But what I intend to write is more about reasonable worst case economic scenarios that the Fed is looking to avoid. While a 1937-style downdraft is something to consider down the line, in the…

Although the euro is now headed up after it overshot to the downside, I believe the European recovery has legs and will continue indefinitely as long as a calamity in Greece doesn’t pull Europe down.

Tiger 5 - Grexit is inevitable

Last night the European Central Bank announced that it would no longer accept Greek government or Greek government-guaranteed collateral for loans. This step had been telegraphed for a month but the timing demonstrates how political an…

The euro crisis is a crisis of Europe, not of European countries. It is not a conflict between Germany and Spain (and I use these two countries to represent every European country on one side or the other of the boom) about who should be…

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.