We appear to be on the cusp of a more serious crisis in Argentina, as things are moving from bad to worse. Spot ARS has dropped as much as 20% earlier today, while the implied “blue chip” FX rate has fallen nearly 10% over the past two…
Yesterday, after some intense industry pressure, US regulators (OCC, FDIC, SEC, etc.) collectively announced that the bulk of the so-called TruPS CDO securities issued prior to May 19, 2010 will be exempt from the Volcker Rule. Let's take a…
By The Brown Brothers Harriman Currency Strategy Team
We call attention to four recent items in China: First, central bank deputy governor penned an article yesterday saying that China will expand the opening-up of the foreign exchange…
We need to abandon the Loanable Funds model of lending, which treats banks as “mere intermediaries” and therefore ignores them in macroeconomics. the Neoclassical belief in Loanable Funds is the biggest barrier there is to the development…
My view remains that Europe is in an incipient but unstable recovery vulnerable to exogenous shocks. However, I do not believe this recovery means that crisis is over. Rather, this is a lull before continued stagnation forces Europe to make…
Standard macroeconomic theory did not help foresee the crisis, nor has it helped understand it or craft solutions. This columns argues that both the New Classical and New Keynesian complete markets macroeconomic theories not only did not…
This column argues that the legacy of public debt resulting from the crisis in the Eurozone is a serious threat. Both the size of the problem and the options to address it make life much more difficult for policymakers than was the case in…
Private and public debt in the Eurozone increased since the 2000s, and especially so in certain countries. This column presents evidence that high levels of private and public debt, together with deleveraging of all sectors, are especially…
debt matters, even if it is possible to pretend for many years that it doesn’t (and this pretense was made possible by the implicit capitalization of debt-servicing costs). Japan never really wrote down all or even most of its investment…