debt

This post is intended to be a hopefully brief synopsis of how the monetary system works using an Austrian framing with MMT terminology. If you don’t know what that means, you’ll see what I mean as I proceed. MMTers like to say that money…

Europe has an enormous productive capacity, Greece included. Debt introduces a money distribution problem that becomes a flashpoint during periods of economic weakness because the inability of large debtors to pay imperils both the debtor,…

Japan and the US, as the two largest economies with high deficits, also have the largest gross financing need, ahead of all of the euro zone periphery, Belgium and France. But they are sovereign in their currencies and have therefore not…

What people don’t realize is that what happened in Iceland has been used as a test case for what’s happening in Greece and what’s happening in Europe, and maybe what happens in the United States

Steve Keen, a well-known Australian professor and economist, spoke at Occupy Sydney saying that the protests all over the world show economic models have failed. He’s not the only saying this obviously. But, what does that actually mean for…

The challenge that the Irish economy faces can best be described in the context of flows and stocks of assets and liabilities. Under the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the IMF/EU/ECB Troika, Ireland must implement a severe fiscal…

I see this deal as a quid pro quo for the banks getting recaps in exchange for writedowns. Because it is a negotiated agreement of a sort of payment in kind, it isn't really clear if the banks are being made whole (as compared to a…

I was just looking at Barry Ritholtz’s synopsis of Felix Zulauf’s observations from an in-office interview Barry had with him and I have to say I agree with the man 100%. But is the die cast? Are we headed into something much worse?

Here are the important extracts from a recent paper in terms of the causes of the crisis. I have also embedded the full pdf version, which has suggested policy prescriptions as well.

We stumbled upon this interesting chart from the Financial Stability Oversight Council’s 2011 Annual report which shows the share of owner equity in household real estate. It surprised us, not so much in that it is at record lows, but that…