currency wars

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,…

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…

It is quite possible that more than one end game will unfold in the months and years to come. For example, we could see a Greek Eurozone exit. Simultaneously, we could have a crisis unfolding across emerging markets, as the strong U.S.…

Compared to the 1930s, this deflationary crisis has played out much slower and more benignly. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a crisis. It is one, as evidenced by the beggar-thy-neighbour tactics like negative rates and quantitative easing that…

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…

This fall, oil prices have tumbled so quickly that the effect on inflation, monetary policy and the economy is likely to be dramatic. As yet, however, we don’t know what those effects are likely to be, in part because the economics…

Right now, the global economy is slowing, with problems in Japan, China, Europe and the Emerging Markets. Only North American growth has remained strong as 2015 approaches. The dip in oil prices changes all of that. While a further fall…

The Germans are saying, “we want the euro and we want to be good European partners, but not on any terms. We will not be in a union that fosters ever-increasing levels of government debt.”

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.

The Federal Reserve’s ‘taper talk’ in spring 2013 has been blamed for outflows of capital from emerging markets. This column argues that global growth prospects and uncertainty are more important drivers of emerging-market capital flows…