demographics

Could a new paper published by researchers from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis finally answer the question of whether affordable housing laws caused the subprime crisis? Yes.

This is a silver level post. Coming up on Friday we get the latest monthly jobs numbers and they are awaited with great anticipation by the market. Of late, the headline numbers have been terrific, but can it last?

This is an interesting one from Bill Gross on financial repression. It goes back to the policies I have called rate easing and permanent zero, where the Fed is practically guaranteeing yields out to three years. Bill Gross sees this and…

The Czech Republic is the first economy in central and eastern Europe to slide back into a full technical recession during the current downturn (evidently it is unlikely to be the last).

The jobs data were the best we have seen in a long time and well above expectations. This and the first upward revisions to the annual revisions were a pleasant surprise. While a lot of people are in disbelief because of a present bearish…

Continuing from part 1 of the Willem Buiter interview with het Financieele Dagblad

If you are still inclined to give Greece the benefit of the doubt, I suggest you study the works of Egan-Jones, a credit rating company located in Haverford, Pennsylvania. Contrary to most other rating companies, Egan-Jones does not receive…

Germany’s ability and willingness to pay will decrease as the economy falters. Remember, Germany is more indebted than Spain and has also long been in violation the Maastricht Treaty’s stability and growth pact provision on government debt…

In the US, there is a heated debate about America’s government pension scheme Social Security. The Republican frontrunner for President Rick Perry has called it a ‘Ponzi scheme’, for which he was derided by the previous Republican…

As I see it, Japan’s problem was that during the 1980s it was so addicted to investment-led growth and artificially cheap financing that it misallocated capital on a massive scale and failed to include the resulting implicit losses in its…