Europe

Last week, the ECB announced that it would begin purchasing securities backed by bank lending to households and firms. Whereas markets and the media have generally greeted this announcement with enthusiasm, this column identifies reasons…

The big news today was the ECB’s decision to lower interest rates 10 basis points to 0.05% and its simultaneous decision to engage in a form of quantitative easing using the asset-backed market as a vehicle. While these measures are…

Welcome back to Credit Writedowns! Labor Day is behind us now and I intend to have a much more regular posting schedule going forward. But the lack of posts has given me some time to reflect on the global macro situation without the need…

Despite the title, this is not a mono-themed post but more of a highlight of recent news and data and their importance in interpreting the direction of the economy and potential effect on markets. I do want to concentrate on European and US…

Before I get into the details today, I want to note that going forward, I may not have the bandwidth to be able to post on a daily basis. I am going to try. But there are definitely going to be weekdays going forward where I won’t be able…

Today is the time to update you on how my 2014 surprises are faring and why. Just to remind you, the surprise list is based on Byron Wien’s list of ten surprises which he has been conducting for the last thirty years. Surprises are events…

I am back from my summer holiday. There has been a lot of news in the time since I last posted. And the news flow is coming from a lot of different places. So, let me start up again with a post highlighting what I think are some of the key…

By Edward Hugh There has been lot’s of debate in the press and in academic circles over the last week or so about whether Italy’s latest contraction constitutes a triple dip recession or simply a continuation of what’s been going on over…

This week’s economic and market themes piece is going to be a little shorter than usual because I have covered a lot of the major topics earlier in the week. United States. Let’s start with the US. The jobs data today showed 208,000 jobs…

The bottom line here is that I have been and still am bullish on the cyclical prospects in the US, UK and Spain in particular. The US jobless claims numbers are unusually low and that tells you that slack in the labour market is declining.…