interest rates

Let’s talk about credible government bond backstops for a bit.

"Based on its regular economic and monetary analyses, the Governing Council decided to reduce the key ECB interest rates by 25 basis points."

Sixty percent of the rich Chinese people have said they intended to migrate from China in a recent poll. What would that mean for FX reserves, interest rates and the economy?

The Federal Reserve holds a two day meeting that concludes near midday tomorrow. It will likely be the first meeting in a while where there is not change in the composition or size of the balance sheet and no fresh initiatives, like cutting…

The Turkish central bank took a turn back to orthodox policy today despite leaving the benchmark 1-week repo rate unchanged at 5.75%. It dropped the language from several previous meetings about potential easing. The bank did hike the…

This chart shows how the Italians have suffered in the sovereign debt crisis. It is as if the ECB never bought bonds.

Last November, in anticipation of QE2, I wrote a post called “How Quantitative Easing and Permanent Zero are Toxic To Bank Net Interest Margins”. The gist of the post was that if the ‘extended period’ for low rates was too long, net…

Europe is slowly but inexorably moving toward its own version of TARP—the U.S. “toxic asset relief program”. Rather than sub-prime mortgages and related derivatives, the toxic assets in Europe are sovereign credits, which in some cases –…

In a February 2010 Casey Report article titled Is China’s Recovery a Fraud?, my thesis was the $2.1 trillion stimulus package rolled out by Chinese authorities after the 2008/2009 financial crash was leading to enormous malinvestment. As…

In October 1993, when Andreas Papandreou was re-elected as prime minister, Greece's liabilities exceeded 100 percent of gross domestic product. The national debt was 114 percent of gross domestic product. Inflation was more than 14 percent…