Economics

This post is going to just be a collection of thoughts I have on the subject of helicopter money based on conversations I have had with people for and against the idea.

I am uneasy about where we are in the economic and credit cycle and the accuracy of the Fed’s forward guidance. I think we are above stall speed now. But I also think global policy divergence, slowing earnings growth and poor capex numbers…

The global economy is an economic system in which any country’s domestic economy is inextricably linked to other economies through the balance of payments mechanisms. The ability to place events within their global context is consequently…

By Michael Pettis Last week Derek Scissors, a think tank analysts at the American Enterprise Institute, published an article in which he referred to an October, 2014, studyby Credit Suisse that attempts to measure total household wealth by…

The point of all this is that models don't have to model everything, and even "wrong" models can be helpful if used in the right way. And narrative has its uses too.

Yesterday was a big conference day in Washington, D.C., with the IMF and World Bank meeting and with the Brookings Institution holding an event featuring the Greek and German finance ministers. While I attended the Brookings event, the…

As Greece staggers under the weight of a depression exceeding that of the 1930s in the US, it appears difficult to see a way forward from what is becoming increasingly a Ponzi financed, extend and pretend, “bailout” scheme. In fact, there…

One of the great things about markets and economics is that there is a lot of uncertainty built into them because, unlike traditional macroeconomic modelling assumptions, real people are unpredictable and irrational. This makes life…

This is going to be a short thought piece. But the takeaway should be that the convergence to zero will continue unabated as the threat of inflation is muted given the combination of excess capacity, high private debt and unfavourable…

Deflationary pressures in China indicates that we probably need monetary tightening, not loosening. I know this sounds extremely counterintuitive, and so violates what we have learned about the world by assuming that the world looks a lot…