demographics

Finnish society, like many other European ones, is in the throes of a major transition. More debate needs to be held on what to do to facilitate the transition, and in the meantime deficit spending to make investments in future productivity…

It is quite possible that more than one end game will unfold in the months and years to come. For example, we could see a Greek Eurozone exit. Simultaneously, we could have a crisis unfolding across emerging markets, as the strong U.S.…

We are still in a post-crisis environment, and enough people are still negative on equities, and interest rates are low enough, to provide plenty of purchasing power. We therefore expect it to be an ok period for equities over the next year…

Last night, Japan’s GDP figures for Q3 came in much lower than expected. GDP fell an annualized 1.6% versus expectations for an annualized increase of 2.2%. This is as large a miss as you will see, and it calls into question the economic…

The Absolute Return Letter, November 2014 “The single most robust and striking fact about cross-national growth is regression to the mean.” -Lawrence Summers and Lant Pritchett Low growth is printed on the wall When financial markets…

While there is no definitive answer at this point to the question whether or not what we are seeing is a creeping process of secular stagnation which will gradually spread from one economy to another as the respective working age…

Topics for today: Tail risk from Ukraine is increasing, giving rise to investment opportunity Argentina is still a basket case US housing will not add appreciably to a US growth acceleration I think the big news in the markets is…

Through the lens of someone looking at economies with rapidly ageing populations we can simply say that this problem arises because there isn't any consumption to pull forward! Fisher's interest theory was always valid, it is merely that in…

Remember that the rest of the world has so far accepted the experiment that is Abenomics not only because Japan has been running a current account deficit (thus making it more reasonable for Japan to weaken its currency), but also because…

Unless serious action is taken, Europe in particular (but the U.S. is not far behind) is at risk of falling into a very deep hole from which it may be extraordinarily difficult to dig itself out of. Once in, it will prove ever so hard to…