currency wars

Poul Thomsen wrote an article on the IMF’s blog site about Iceland that I would to highlight. The lessons bear repeating given the economic problems in Europe and the US. The IMF worked with Iceland to stabilise the economy and avoid…

Gold is up big today and trading like the monetary printing presses are ready to kick into overdrive. We believe the recent Fed speak about QE3, possible BofJ intervention to weaken the yen, and growing expectations that tomorrow’s…

The auxiliary objective of QE by the Fed is to weaken the USD. Herein lies the rub. Quite simply, with the recent announcement by the BOE of another round of QE worth £75 billion, with the ECB now willingly or unwillingly being forced into…

Judging from this chart drawn up by the Financial Times, it would seem that Turkey is winning the currency wars and China is losing them.

Reuters has reported that Bank of China, a dealer in China's foreign exchange market, has stopped doing foreign exchange forwards and swaps with several European banks. Separately, sources say the European banks involved are Societe…

Comstock Partnrs writes that its fund is currently positioned to benefit from a declining stock market. This bearishness is mostly due to the enormous debt built up over the last few decades (total debt-including private debt-- was $11…

Frederick Searby says that Brazil has the opposite problem of the developed economies in that it is dealing with overheating and inflation while the developed economies have a serious deflationary undertow. His view is that if there is a…

In characteristic form, the currency traders and those who trade in what is dubbed "financial news" woke up last week and discovered, à la Rip Van Winkle, that the Swiss franc was a haven currency charging higher. Never you mind that it has…

It is very clear that Brazil is moving further and further away from the orthodox model due to its obsession with the strong real. While the IMF said today in its Article IV discussions with Brazil that capital controls are an “appropriate”…

Elga Bartsch, a ECB shadow council member and Chief European Economist at Morgan Stanley, talked to Bloomberg about the sovereign debt crisis today. She said that the ECB would be hard-pressed to do a 180 on its hawkish tightening position…