currencies

In the last post at Credit Writedowns Pro on jobs, I promised to talk about currency issues but I didn't! here are two issues then: the increasing current account surplus in Germany and the strong dollar's effect on China. On Germany,…

The recent election of an explicitly anti-austerity party in Greece has upset the prevailing policy consensus in the eurozone, and raised a number of issues that have remained ignored or suppressed in policy circles. Expansionary fiscal…

Just following up on yesterday’s post, I want to go into further detail regarding two situations in Europe and pivot to a Canadian-centric look at North America. ALl of these threads won’t tie together but I will see what I can do to bring…

No story is really dominating headlines today. So I thought it would be a good time to look around at a number of different topics I have written on in the past. Of course, Greece is still the biggest issue but it is optimism today instead…

Three stories dominating the headlines today are the Greek sovereign debt crisis, the euro area’s economic fortunes and crude oil. I want to tell these three stories through the lens of the debt swap proposed by Yanis Varoufakis, through…

In the wake of the turmoil surrounding the Swiss Franc, the Danish krone has become the subject of speculative attack. Unlike the Swiss, the Danes have a peg to the euro that is permanent and long-lasting. They also have a backstop via a…

I had been intending to write this post as a counterpoint to what I wrote yesterday about curve inversion. The Chief bullet point was going to be about the Fed’s not wanting to create curve inversion. But with the Swiss National Bank move,…

The Swiss National Bank’s announcement that it had decided to scrap its floor for the Swiss Franc against the euro is the biggest thing to hit the foreign exchange market since the UK and Sweden were booted out of ERM. This is a very big…

We are still in a post-crisis environment, and enough people are still negative on equities, and interest rates are low enough, to provide plenty of purchasing power. We therefore expect it to be an ok period for equities over the next year…

While I try not to be too alarmist here, it is clear now that the drop in oil prices has been both precipitous enough and long-enduring enough that we should start talking about this as a crisis in the making. We have an interconnectedness…