government

According to Greece's finance ministry, Greece's government was able to record its first primary surplus in years. This is a measure of a budget based on revenue minus expenditure excluding interest costs and is commonly thought of a…

Moody's Investors Service has today downgraded Croatia's government bond rating to Ba1 from Baa3. Moody's has also changed the outlook to stable from negative.

Unappreciated by many is the fact that the Italian economy has seen the largest contraction (7%) since the crisis began within the euro zone after Greece. Per capita income is back, according to former ECB's Bini Smaghi, to where it was in…

I just wanted to follow up on Randy Wray's last post to look at this Trillion Dollar Coin idea from an investing perspective. I believe the coin would be bullish for Treasuries because it lowers average Treasury duration and alters private…

A good article in the Spanish-language Actibva reviews what to expect from the Spanish government regarding debt and deficits in 2013. I can't speak to the predictive ability here but the article is good at a minimum for its highlighting of…

The rise of nationalism does not bode well for Japan's participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an attempt to build a free-trade area covering both sides of the Pacific. Although it was somewhat controversial for the DPJ, it had…

The explosive market rally following the fiscal cliff agreement was based more on what didn't happen than what did. What didn't happen was the implementation of automatic tax increases and spending cuts that would have shaved about 5% off…

Here's a very good video on MMT with Stephanie Kelton, the chair of the Economics department at the University of Missouri at Kansas City talking to Lauren Lyster of RT's Capital Account. As you know, despite my Austrian bias and my…

The last post I wrote on endogenous money and fully reserved banking set out a case for viewing the demand for credit to attain real or financial assets as a fundamental aspect of any monetary system. The point of that post was to make…

Yesterday I wrote a lot about this topic for Gold subscribers, asking "Will Merkel grant ‘austerity model’ Ireland retroactive bank recap mutualisation?" This post gives a full account of the European bank recap issue, so I won't re-hash…