demographics

Jeremy Grantham's most recent quarterly report was released yesterday. Grantham expanded on his low-growth macro view with a number of additional insights based on both secular and political trends dominating the US economic picture. As…

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the Telegraph had an interesting post out yesterday on demographic trends in China. He writes that the working-age population in China is now shrinking as China ages quickly, in part due to the one-child policy.…

A lot has been made of so-called Abenomics after comments in Japan about forcing the central bank to set and defend a 2% inflation target. Getting a consolidated government balance sheet from a fiscal and monetary agent working hand-in-hand…

Jeremy Grantham's quarterly piece is out now and the important topic is the lack of growth in the US. The way that Grantham paints the picture - and I believe this is an accurate depiction - the US is not just suffering from a cyclical…

This is a quick piece here on the labor participation rate, following up on the piece I wrote last week about the jobs numbers not being consistent with recession. Mike Shedlock at Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis and Bill McBride at…

By Sober Look Friday's employment figures were terrible across the board, although some have naively interpreted the decline in the headline unemployment rate (from 8.3% to 8.1%) as positive news. Unfortunately there is nothing positive…

And going beyond April, the political arithmetic of a post Monti government looks complicated, making the kind of stability needed to advance what the population may well see as “harsh” reforms unlikely. In other words, as Monti says, when…

The Economist: "Over the past 30 years, China’s total fertility rate—the number of children a woman can expect to have during her lifetime—has fallen from 2.6, well above the rate needed to hold a population steady, to 1.56, well below that…

At around 9:00am London time this morning Lord Wolfson held a press conference to announce the five finalists in his economics prize contest. Naturally Lord Wolfson is not looking for just any solutions, as the initial question makes clear,…

Kondratieff waves are these supercycles that a lot of people have been talking about in the context of the great leveraging that led to crisis in developed economies. We appear to be at the end of one of these waves in bond markets…