financial history

by Michael Pettis The seemingly imminent and inexorable rise of the renminbi as a major, even dominant, reserve and trading currency, has been almost as widely heralded as the equivalent rise of the Japanese yen just twenty years ago. Even…

Frederick Sheehan is the author of Panderer to Power: The Untold Story of How Alan Greenspan Enriched Wall Street and Left a Legacy of Recession  (McGraw-Hill, 2009). On Friday, October 15, 2010, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S.…

Opinion seems nearly universal that what we are currently experiencing is not the typical business cycle with which we are familiar. Besides being the end of a long speculative bubble, and the magnitudes involved, the significance of what…

by Comstock Partners For the third time in a little more than ten years Wall Street has embraced a dubious narrative to drive the market higher in the face of crumbling fundamentals. In early 2000 the conventional wisdom discarded over a…

by Annaly Capital Management In recent weeks, the Plaza Accord has been receiving a lot of attention, particularly after the IMF’s annual meeting in Washington concluded without making any progress on currency issues. If you recall, the…

By Annaly Capital Management A common phrase often overheard on your favorite financial news channels goes something like this: “Stocks are cheap relative to bonds.” After all, the dividend yield on the Dow Jones Industrial Average is now…

Frederick Sheehan is the author of Panderer to Power: The Untold Story of How Alan Greenspan Enriched Wall Street and Left a Legacy of Recession (McGraw-Hill, 2009). "I assure this committee that, if I am confirmed, I…

Chrystia Freeland introduces Dr. Roubini, reminding him that he is still known as Dr. Doom. She quips he should wear the name with pride because he was "one of the very few economists who was actually right about the crisis." This…

Irving Fisher was a leading economist in the early 20th century. After being caught out during the Great Depression (he famously quipped, "Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau." right before the…

"Malaise" speech When the energy market exploded — an occurrence Carter tried to avoid during his term — he was planning on delivering his fifth major speech on energy; however, he felt that the American people were no…