malinvestment

The Free Exchange blog at The Economist has accepted my bet, and very cleverly (the bastards!) they have added a second one. For two years I have been arguing that a Chinese rebalancing will require much slower GDP growth rates than we…

Yesterday, John Carney at CNBC had a nice little post comparing Hyman Minsky's Financial Instability Hypothesis with some of the thinking by Friedrich von Hayek behind Austrian Business Cycle Theory. John rightly points to this passage as…

Last August, the Fed went for what I call "rate easing". If the economy weakens this year what will it do? I am not convinced it will be quantitative easing. In general, I think the Fed, while looking to support the growth side of its dual…

Michael Pettis predicts a hard landing in China. How much will growth slow? The World Bank report apparently doesn’t say, but the consensus has been slowly moving down towards 5-6% annual growth over the next few years. That’s better than…

This is an interesting one from Bill Gross on financial repression. It goes back to the policies I have called rate easing and permanent zero, where the Fed is practically guaranteeing yields out to three years. Bill Gross sees this and…

In 2008 and 2009 I argued that the crisis we were undergoing would affect every major economy in the world, but not necessarily at the same pace. I said that China would be the last major economy to emerge from the crisis. Why? Because the…

One conclusion from the Fed's actions is that it doesn't care as much about its inflation target as it does about improving the unemployment rate. Thus, it will err on the side of letting inflation rise, if it would improve unemployment.…

I am glad to say that the overinvestment thesis is much more widely acknowledged today than it was even two or three years ago, but one myth, I think, is that most of the overinvestment excesses in China are concentrated in the real estate…

Shanghai’s channel surfing Panda bears are speaking with a little higher pitch this weekend after getting their ‘hood caught in a vicious squeeze and reversal. The stock index has bounced 8.7 percent off its January 6th lows after falling…

With the Chinese New Year holiday period approaching, it becomes a bit harder to discern PBOC’s policy intentions. It typically adds liquidity aggressively ahead of the holidays, but this year it comes at a time when the central bank is…