Kindleberger

By Michael Pettis In the past few weeks I have been getting a lot of questions about serial sovereign defaults and how to predict which countries will or won’t suspend debt payments or otherwise get into trouble.  The most common…

The news about Greece's bailout has me thinking a lot about Creditanstalt, the Austrian bank which collapsed in 1931. This account bears remembering because we should see the 1929-1933 descent as a two-part episode, with the second part…

Edward Chancellor, author of the seminal book on financial speculation and manias “Devil Take The Hindmost,” is now turning his eyes to China.  He sees a number of red flags which point to excess in China. Chancellor writes:…

I was talking to a friend of mine who does emerging market investing for a living and I asked him what he made of recent China-bullish comments by Stephen Roach.  The Morgan Stanley Asia head was in Germany speaking to German…

Nearly a month ago, back on May 5th, I highlighted some testimony by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke before congress in a post labelled, “Bernanke expects recovery later this year". In his testimony, Bernanke used the phrase…

This account bears remembering because we can see the 1929-1933 descent as a two-part episode, with the second part starting here. It should be noted that there were a lot of positive economic signs before the Creditanstalt ruined this.…

David Rosenberg has been one of the voices of reason warning of excesses during the recent boom and predicting the unraveling to which we are now witness.  I have quoted him liberally here.  There is a very good piece on Rosenberg in the…

For those of you who have been following things, you know we have had three panics since the credit crisis began. The first was in August 2007. The 2nd after Bear Stearns collapsed and the third was creeping up after IndyMac and the GSE…

So, I am back in the saddle after a great weekend in Palm Beach. And three days almost entirely away from Newspapers, Televisions, Telephones, and Computers is a very good thing to clear the head. (Although I did happen to catch Sarah…

The next time you hear someone say that things are worse than the Great Depression now, do me a favor and smack them upside the head for me, please. This is the kind of nonsense you hear nowadays and we need to dispel these myths right…