journalism

After a good run-up in the last month, the Mexican Peso is getting crushed in the currency markets today.  How much of the pullback is a result of the news regarding Swine Flu and how much is technical, due to the prior run up, is hard to…

Former President of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, and former U.S. Secretary of State, George Shultz, reflect on the events surrounding the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Irrespective of whether one thinks the stress tests used to test the U.S. banking system is a sham (10% unemployment is not a worst-case scenario), the fact of the matter is these tests MUST show some differentiation in order to be…

Simon Johnson, a former IMF Chief Economist, who blogs over at the Baseline Scenario, is testifying before Congress today about 'Too big to fail' financial institutions.  Below is a video in which he tells Bloomberg his thoughts on the…

On the back of a decent quarter at JPMorgan Chase, CEO Jamie Dimon has signalled his desire to repay government money as quickly as possible and remove the strings attached to that money.  Dimon has often said that JPMorgan Chase did not…

Jim Grant is definitely not in the deflation camp. He believes a robust policy response and enormous expansion in the Fed balance sheet is storing up monster inflationary forces which could take holding a recovery. As a result, he is…

One of my favorite books is "The Power Broker," a book for which Robert Caro won a Pulitzer Prize. It documents the life and times of master builder Robert Moses, who shaped New York City and American and world city planning for decades.…

Despite the fact that I can envisage a cyclical upturn this Winter, the menace of bank writedowns is ever-present. One analyst who has been particularly prescient on warning on this front is Mike Mayo, now working at Calyon. Below David…

This clip is very much in line with my thinking from a previous post.

In 2 hours I will be on BBC World News Today talking about the recent government actions involving the auto industry. Afterwards, I will have more to say about this here. In the meantime, here is what Barack Obama had to say.