malinvestment

According to an analysis by Reuters, small and medium-sized banks in the US have started to take on risk as the squeeze in net interest margins is beginning to hurt profitability. The goal is to boost returns despite the low-interest rate…

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the Telegraph had an interesting post out yesterday on demographic trends in China. He writes that the working-age population in China is now shrinking as China ages quickly, in part due to the one-child policy.…

QE is an asset swap. No new net financial assets are introduced into the private sector in contrast to when the government deficit spends and does add new net financial assets. So for it to have all of those seriously beneficial effects…

Raghuram Rajan has an interesting post now up on Project Syndicate. The overall tone of it has an Austrian feel as it stresses the failure of stimulus to allow developed economies to attain higher GDP growth a full five years after a…

According to the Financial Times, the Australian mining group Fortescue has moved into expansion mode on the back of robust iron-ore prices that are now at an eight-month high. The reason for the rebound is the reflation efforts of the…

 If you look at the recent economic data coming out of China, it is clear the economy is in a bottoming process. The question is whether the measures used to keep the economy from sliding further are sustainable. The most recent piece of…

A reader asked me to comment on a video from the Big Picture conference of Jim Bianco commenting on the so-called wealth effect of quantitative easing. In the video, Jim takes the position that the Fed cannot create permanent wealth though…

By Michael Pettis Chiwoong Lee at Goldman Sachs has a new report out (“China vs. 1970s Japan”, September 25, 2012) in which he predicts that China’s long-term growth rate will drop to 7.5-8.5%. I disagree very strongly with his forecast,…

By Michael Pettis I recently “debated” twice with senior Chinese officials on the future prospects for China. In both cases they made the argument that Chinese growth rates were going to rise in the next few years and that the current deep…

I was looking at Tim Duy's latest post on monetary policy and asking myself the same question he asks about normalizing the interest rate cycle. Here's what Tim wrote about getting off the zero bound: "it is perfectly reasonable to…