debt

Major advanced economies have made mixed progress in repairing the private sector’s balance sheets. This column explores private sector deleveraging trends and calls for a set of policies that will return debt to safer levels. Monetary…

Introducing a currency in parallel to the euro could help Greece repay its external debt and resume economic activity. This second column in a two-part series evaluates the different options and their effects on aggregate demand and fiscal…

To prevent it from defaulting on its debt, the Greek government might need to introduce a new domestic currency, in parallel to the euro. This column, the first in a two-part series, compares the current proposals for a parallel currency…

The question of whether markets are prepared for the default of such a large debtor is a good one to ask in thinking about tail risk as the situation at Petrobras encapsulates the intersection of emerging market US dollar corporate debt,…

There is a legal concept called "odious debts." It can be traced back more than a century. The US helped create a precedent for it by denying Cuba's responsibility for the debt incurred under Spanish colonial rule. The concept took on…

The last post was an attempt to describe a reasonable worse case scenario for the US real economy as relatively benign compared to 1937, a comparison making the rounds these days due to a piece by Bridgewater’s Ray Dalio. My point is that…

The title of this post is a bit alarmist. But what I intend to write is more about reasonable worst case economic scenarios that the Fed is looking to avoid. While a 1937-style downdraft is something to consider down the line, in the…

Although the euro is now headed up after it overshot to the downside, I believe the European recovery has legs and will continue indefinitely as long as a calamity in Greece doesn’t pull Europe down.

Tiger 5 - Grexit is inevitable

Last night the European Central Bank announced that it would no longer accept Greek government or Greek government-guaranteed collateral for loans. This step had been telegraphed for a month but the timing demonstrates how political an…