history

Whatever can be said for and against Barclays and Bob Diamond, the story is in danger of exhausting itself at the wrong link in the chain. It has sidelined BubbleTV's around-the-clock coverage of Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg's dog walker has…

Charles Kindleberger’s classic book on the Great Depression was originally published 40 years ago. In the preface to a new edition, two leading economists argue that the lessons are as relevant as ever.

By Michael Pettis About ten years ago I published an article in Foreign Policy that I just recently re-read.  In the article I extended one of the arguments I made in my book, The Volatility Machine, that the globalization process is…

I have written quite a few posts highlighting the statements made by Herbert Hoover during his US presidency as he struggled with the economic contraction of the Great Depression. The general tenor of Hoover's comments and actions goes to…

"The German government has, for the first time, released hundreds of pages of documents from 1994 to 1998 on the introduction of the euro and the inclusion of Italy in the euro zone."

In 1921, the US, a creditor nation, was fighting boom time inflation and turned to 'austerity' to defeat it. Europe on the other hand was seeing a debt-laden deflationary episode after the Great War. This episode has historical lessons for…

Australian house prices peaked in June 2010. The motive force behind Australia’s bubble was the same as in the USA and Japan: accelerating debt drove rising house prices during the boom. Now in both those countries, decelerating debt is…

The FDR moment occurred in 1933 when FDR took the reigns of monetary policy from an ineffective Fed and sparked a robust recovery in aggregate demand. The Fed had allowed aggregate demand to collapse for three years when FDR responded. He…

The following is a March 1932 speech by then US President Herbert Hoover about the growing US deficit. As I indicated in previous posts on Hoover's travails, the President earnestly wanted to balance the budget (see Herbert Hoover: White…

A common denominator runs throughout recorded history: a rising proportion of debts cannot be paid. Adam Smith remarked that no government ever had repaid its debt, and today the same can be said of the overall volume of private-sector…