Forecasts

The latest flow of funds data from the US Federal Reserve show that the great American household deleveraging may be over. This should add a credit accelerator to the US economy which maintains growth. Meanwhile analysts are increasingly…

Those inclined to the Fed tapering in December seem myopic. The employment was not the only economic report that was released before the weekend. The US also reported that the Fed's preferred measure of inflation, the deflator for core…

I am not a bull, largely because I have concerns about the long-term sustainability of today’s policy mix in Europe and the United States and the rise in equity multiples. But it is undeniable that we are seeing a more bullish outlook for…

My view since the beginning of the financial crisis has been that policy levers to alleviate this private debt stress are limited, and that this limitation will be felt in defaults, writedowns and deleveraging of a magnitude that is larger…

That's right, despite all of the recent "bubble talk," it is entirely possible that stocks could rise 30% higher from here. However, it is not because valuations are cheap because as I discussed in my recent analysis of Q3 earnings stocks…

Martin Wolf has written a column in the FT with which I agree, claiming that Germany is a weight on the world. The essence of his argument is that Germany’s export-led growth model is a ‘beggar-thy-neighbor’ policy in a world short of…

This morning I made the argument that the global economy is growing across the breadth of developed and developing economies. I still have a problem with Europe though as I believe the risk is to the downside. Basically, the policy response…

Below are the video and some excerpts from a recent interview BlackRock CEO Larry Fink did with Bloomberg Television. The interview here is mostly about the effect of the government shutdown and debt ceiling crisis on the economy and…

Summary: I expect the debt ceiling impasse to be overcome today as a result of a Senate-brokered deal. With this manufactured crisis out of the way, we can concentrate on earnings and on the economy. While US growth is on track, I expect…

It is still too early for all of these predictions either to have materialized or to have failed, but I thought it might be useful to review them to see whether or not they have been reasonably accurate in describing unfolding events and,…