internal devaluation

by Edward Hugh Just to follow up on my recent long Estonia post, a couple of new data points have caught my attention recently: the sharp rise in Estonian inflation and the ongoing goods trade deficit. In the first place it is worth…

Morgan Stanley has an interesting piece out today, arguing there is  no 'currency war'... yet. Win Thin made some points on this score yesterday, pointing to real effective exchange rates in developing countries. Morgan Stanley's Manoj…

by Michael Hudson, President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City and author of…

by Edward Hugh According to an intriguing article I read in Bloomberg recently an alert signal has been sounded due to the fact that house prices in the Scandinavian countries have been rising very rapidly of late. Judging by what they…

Here are some quick thoughts on what's happening in Ireland. The Irish situation is mostly about the collapse in the economy due to a huge run-up in private sector debts. This has been complicated by Iceland-style bailouts for an outsized…

Now that I am back in the saddle, I am going to start doing my week in review narratives again with links to the most newsworthy posts from the past week or so. On second thought, let me actually cover the ground back to the beginning of…

In a recent FT Op-ed, entitled "Estonia’s recovery defies economists and academics", columnist John Dizard argued that "the “internal devaluation” policy, which means cuts in nominal costs such as wages and rents, was very…

Watching the TV news here is Spain at the moment is often a rather discomforting and sad affair. The normal menu seems to consist of a constant stream of ministers who have to appear before the cameras and the public to explain something…

Well, this is certainly not the first time I have had cause to complain about the quality of the journalism and economic reporting served up over at the Economist, and I’m damn sure it won’t be the last. But this latest example of shoddy (I…

by Edward Hugh According to Ralph Atkins, writing in the Financial Times: "Eurozone mortgage borrowing grew last month at the fastest pace in almost two years in a sign that bank lending across the 16-country region may be flickering…