history

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…

This is a good interview with Hugh Hendry, who I always enjoy. It runs twenty minutes. Hugh Hendry, of Eclectica Asset Management, takes the long view on investing at The Economist's Buttonwood Gathering on October 25th 2012. He was…

Frederick J. 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) and "The Coming Collapse of the Municipal Bond Market"…

By Michael Pettis In the past two weeks we have been treated with a mostly positive but nonetheless mixed bag of economic data from China. There has been good news, bad news, good news with worrying underlying trends, and bad news with…

A few weeks ago, I postulated that Christine Lagarde was increasingly moving the IMF away from its position as 'enforcer' of orthodox neoclassical economic policy. I backed this up with three specific ways in which the IMF was becoming a…

By Michael Pettis Chiwoong Lee at Goldman Sachs has a new report out (“China vs. 1970s Japan”, September 25, 2012) in which he predicts that China’s long-term growth rate will drop to 7.5-8.5%. I disagree very strongly with his forecast,…

Josh Barro has written a very comprehensive post at Bloomberg analsying Mitt Romney's tax plan. His conclusion is that the plan is mathematically impossible, leading one to assume that a President Romney would have to break his pledge on…

By Andrew G Haldane, Executive Director, Financial Stability, Bank of England There is a long list of culprits when it comes to assigning blame for the financial crisis. This column argues economists are among the guilty, having succumbed…

I haven't done the daily for a few days because I have been trying to get out a few more lengthy posts. But today I wanted to highlight the inflation issue because I will be speaking on a Euromoney panel about investing in inflation later…

I have had a lot of other things on my plate and haven't been able to write as regularly as I would like. But I am going to try to increase the volume of posts by putting out more quick hits like this one that capture my macro view without…