Japan

In the lead-up to next week’s G8 summit, the Chinese have been making yet more noises about setting up a new monetary system without the dollar as its anchor and leading reserve currency.  The Chinese, who have maintained a export…

Will Hutton has a pretty good interview with Paul Krugman in the Guardian newspaper.  The exchange is quite long, so it gives you a fairly broad understanding of Krugman’s view on the global economy and specific country economies.  What I…

It is not just the Chinese making noises about the reliability of the United States as a debtor.  Now, Japanese politicians are doing it too.  In fact, the Democratic Party of Japan (which is not in power) have said they would not buy U.S.…

The following is the currency outlook released today by the Brown Brothers Harriman Currency Strategy team: Swine flu and concerns about US banks may be hitting the headlines but, the European banking sector remains a threat for the euro…

This is another post I originally ran on Naked Capitalism last month. As you know, I have turned more positive about the potential for a cyclical economic recovery. However, I am unchanged regarding much of the sentiment expressed in this…

Yesterday, I posted an item on Naked Capitalism about the bankruptcy of Yamaichi Securities in 1996 as testament to lingering weakness in a country's financial sector if sick financial institutions are not dealt with swiftly. In essence,…

I do believe the U.S. policy response to this financial crisis is very much like the Japanese response to their crisis in the 1990s. I have a post up at "naked capitalism" making this point. I would add, however, that America is in a…

As I mentioned in my post, "TALF: A bailout if one reads the fine print" the TALF is not a program ONLY for U.S. institutions. It is a vehicle for re-starting the U.S. asset-backed securities credit markets. In fact, the first recipient…

Overnight, the Japanese government released figures for Q4 2008 GDP that pointed to a depression-like fall in the Japanese economy. GDP contracted 3.3% from Q3, or 12.7% using the U.S. convention of annualizing those numbers. This is the…

The statistics coming out of Japan have been truly awful of late. In my last post, you saw a small video connecting reduced spending in the U.S. to Japan. However, I need to be more explicit about how things are unraveling in Japan. The…