financial repression

A lot has been made of so-called Abenomics after comments in Japan about forcing the central bank to set and defend a 2% inflation target. Getting a consolidated government balance sheet from a fiscal and monetary agent working hand-in-hand…

Over the American thanksgiving holiday three years ago in 2009, the relatively small sovereign-linked debtor Dubai World announced it would suspend payments on its debt obligations. Dubai World was a state-owned conglomerate in the emirate…

By Niels Jensen The Absolute Return Letter, December 2012 “It’s one thing to have an opinion on the macro, but something very different to act as if it’s correct.” -Howard Marks, Oaktree Capital Management It can be a frustrating, and…

According to a questionnaire given by the leftist German party "Die Linke", German pensioners have seen a significant erosion of their purchasing power over the last twelve years. Average pension payments this year after deducting all…

This crisis has broken a lot of economic taboos, with central banks buying up assets and expanding their balance sheets in a desperate effort  to reflate a debt-laden private sector. The goal is to maintain economic growth, even at the risk…

I spoke on the panel of a conference that backed into a keynote address by Dennis Gartman. I thought he had a lot of interesting things to say, a lot of which I agreed with. The basic theme of his talk - and this was an investing in…

I participated in a Euromoney conference on investing in inflation this afternoon. I was on a panel of five right before the closing remarks by keynote speaker Dennis Gartman and I wanted to make a few remarks about what I learned. First,…

By Sober Look High Yield corporate loans (sometimes also called "institutional", "syndicated", "leveraged", "par", or "bank" loans) continue to be in high demand. And it's not only hedge funds and CLOs (see post) who like this product.…

A key negative side effect of persistently low rates on households is the delay of retirement. This inability of many Americans to retire on their savings because of low rates is keeping them in the workforce, limiting job opportunities for…

Liberalizing interest rates means that those sectors of the economy who have benefitted from very low lending rates – SOEs, local and municipal governments, real estate developers, and other large borrowers – are likely to find many reasons…