Economics

Marshall Auerback here. Ed has had a few posts on the Swedish bailout plan with which I agree. I think the main political argument (made by Bo Lundgren in yesterday's NY Times) is that you have ZERO political legitimacy unless everybody…

I named my blog "Credit Writedowns" because I anticipated an historic wave of credit writedowns in the global banking system which would lead to a wave of deleveraging, systemic risk, and bank failures -- in short, a massive financial and…

Not if you believe the figures from a University of Calgary - C.D. Howe Institute study comparing tax rates in 80 countries - remember, they're Canadians (hat tip Stephen Gordon). In this list, which includes all the major economies, the…

The last place in the world you wold expect to hear support of Ben Bernanke is hear. The Bernanke Fed has been as reckless in its attempts to reflate the economy as the Greenspan Fed - probably more so. Nevertheless, when Willem Buiter, a…

The minutes of the Bank of England's most recent Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) meeting demonstrate that Britain's monetary policy makers are all over the shop. Most committee members voted to keep rates at 5%, but there was also a vote…

Baltic currencies are overvalued, which has led to hot money flows and unsustainable levels of consumption. A crash is all but inevitable. The Baltics want in to the Euro, Estonia and Lithuania in particular. They are willing to…

I'm getting a lot of mail about the Rosenberg post and my mea culpa on inflation. To be blunt, a lot of you think I'm out to lunch and Rosenberg is too -- after all inflation is over 5% and that's just the bogus CPI measure our governments…

Most Americans would have you believe that the U.S. Federal Reserve was entirely responsible for the monetary conditions which created the mother of all stock market bubbles after the LTCM bailout. Yes, the Fed was complicit in the…

I've been thinking a lot about unrealized gains and their effect on the global economy. if you remember, I wrote a few weeks ago about a new debit card that lets people tap the money from their 401(k) plan. I think these cards are a bad…

Clive Crook of the Financial Times rightly takes on the Bush Administration and its squandering of hundreds of billions of dollars of fiscal surplus on war in Iraq and ta cuts for the wealthy. In this time of economic crisis, the U.S. is…