currencies

A lot has been made of so-called Abenomics after comments in Japan about forcing the central bank to set and defend a 2% inflation target. Getting a consolidated government balance sheet from a fiscal and monetary agent working hand-in-hand…

Until just recently, Germany was more indebted than Spain. The country was the first, along with France, to breach the Maastricht Treaty's 3% hurdle for annual deficits in 2005, prompting a change in the rules. And Germany has also been in…

Here's a very good video on MMT with Stephanie Kelton, the chair of the Economics department at the University of Missouri at Kansas City talking to Lauren Lyster of RT's Capital Account. As you know, despite my Austrian bias and my…

By Marc Chandler The Federal Reserve was as aggressively dovish as any one expected. It added to QE $45 bln a month in US Treasuries, keeping the $40 bln of month of MBS purchases. It also changed from time reference for guidance to use of…

By Michael Pettis In the past two weeks we have been treated with a mostly positive but nonetheless mixed bag of economic data from China. There has been good news, bad news, good news with worrying underlying trends, and bad news with…

Note: this daily will not have links as I am still on holiday. But, I will begin to post more in the coming week and resume a normal posting schedule next week. Yesterday, Moody's Investors Service finally downgraded the sovereign credit…

After the Great Depression broke out, American economist Irving Fischer championed a view of the financial system now called "endogenous money", which sees each person in the economy as a creator of credit. Viewing the economy through this…

By Marc Chandler The Wall Street Journal brings to our attention the fact that the reserves at the Reserve Bank of Australia have risen sharply over the past two months. Its reserves have risen by A$863 mln over the past two months after…

After embarking on a third round of easing last year that only involved extending the length of its zero rate policy and changing the Fed's Treasury portfolio duration mix, the Fed has recently started QE3 with an even more aggressive tone.…

I saw this story yesterday in a Swedish newspaper and thought it was interesting enough to comment on. Apparently, Swedish investment professionals are telling clients that the Spanish market is "hot" right now, given the depressed state of…