debt

the ECB decided to prop up the German economy with low interest rates, rates that produced negative real interest rates and housing bubbles in Ireland and Spain. This was a policy designed to "bail out" the indebted German economy. We…

I would submit then that the problem is the debt. This is true right across the developed economies. Until the debt is reduced, global growth will be slow and that makes economies susceptible to recession. As much as the President wants to…

This is a belated commentary for Friday. I have a lot of links on the global growth slowdown today but I covered this earlier saying Weak global economic data signal likelihood of global recession. I wanted to highlight Marshall Auerback's…

The two charts below give one a sense of the relative size of the government debt markets in the euro zone as well as the size of those markets compared to each country's GDP. Estonia has both the smallest government debt market and the…

Yesterday, we highlighted the talk that Steve Keen gave at the INET conference as our only post. Today, we present the full and in-depth version including his written analysis via Steve Keen's DebtWatch website. Steve ends with two…

The jobs numbers were disappointing. From a policy perspective, the hope is that we can keep stimulus in the queue long enough so that the cyclical hiring trends pick up before overindebted consumers get fatigued again. But underneath…

This week's weekly commentary on markets and the economy features Spain. In my view, the potential for downside economic and portfolio risk has increased markedly as we realise that Spain is at risk and there is no plan B in the euro zone.…

A common denominator runs throughout recorded history: a rising proportion of debts cannot be paid. Adam Smith remarked that no government ever had repaid its debt, and today the same can be said of the overall volume of private-sector…

To try to work out what China's future economic options might be I will begin with two key assumptions. The first is that the fundamental imbalance in China is the very low GDP share of consumption. This low GDP share of consumption, I have…

I think this video is worth watching because Keen gets to the heart of the issues with the standard approach to economics. He says that banks, money and debt are front and center in reality as we now see after the crisis. Consequently, they…