Forecasts

Last October, I highlighted the issue of bailout extensions to Ireland and Portugal and so I want to re-visit this theme now that Portugal and Ireland are in the news looking to change the terms of their existing bailouts.

Although the House GOP leadership has been divided on how to deal with the upcoming fiscal contests, they have apparently decided to raise the debt ceiling and focus on the sequester as I have predicted.

While Germany's numbers for Q4 2012 were poor, showing a contraction of 0.5%, I noted in my last post on Germany that this does not mean recession. The contraction was due to export and capital investment figures, which look to rebound in…

In the past year, I have increasingly turned away from the US housing market to stress the difficulties now besetting other global housing markets because there have been large house price appreciations (and some declines) elsewhere in…

German GDP contracted by an unexpectedly large 0.5% in Q4 2012, according to preliminary estimates of the German government. The contraction is largely due to receding trade volume and does not necessarily mean Germany is in recession…

The last post predicted a recession in the United States for Q2 as a result of the fiscal standoff in the United States. However, as I have been largely upbeat about the underlying fundamentals in the United States, this call is predicated…

Last Tuesday I said then that the debt ceiling fight would come first but that default on US public debt would be a step too far - and so Republicans would capitulate, forcing them to put their efforts into the sequester cuts. The biggest…

This is going to be a quick hit. But I thought I should put this out there now that the Platinum Coin idea has been rejected, something that makes this downside scenario more likely. The idea here is that we are in an interregnum period…

The latest opinion polls in Germany show Angela Merkel at her most popular. But her governing coalition partner FDP will almost certainly miss the 5% hurdle in Germany's general election, leaving the political landscape very uncertain.