malinvestment

Over the holidays, a debate broke out in the blogosphere about the so-called job guarantee idea that the MMT folks have bandied about. I call this controversial idea "Unemployment Insurance for the 21st Century", something I first addressed…

Here’s a good all-encompassing Bloomberg TV video with Morgan Stanley’s Stephen Roach from Friday. He is not impressed with the IMF plans that the Europeans are working on, calling the numbers “chump change”. Roach also talks about the US…

For years I have been arguing that the Achilles heel of the Chinese growth model is the unsustainable rise in debt that comes as a necessary consequence of capital misallocation fueled by bank lending. Capital misallocation, I argued, was…

In a February 2010 Casey Report article titled Is China’s Recovery a Fraud?, my thesis was the $2.1 trillion stimulus package rolled out by Chinese authorities after the 2008/2009 financial crash was leading to enormous malinvestment. As…

How does manufacturing CPI inflation benefit an economy in which incomes are falling? When inflation rises and incomes are stagnant or falling, the economy rolls over.

The overall gist of Jim Chanos' comments on Bloomberg yesterday were that China has off-balance sheet contingent liabilities due to its implicit commitment to state-owned enterprises which are kneee-deep in land and property speculation.…

There is a road open for China involving controlled inflation that would lead to re-balancing, both domestically and internationally, which has some uncertainties. These must be compared to those of sustaining the export-led growth model,…

As I see it, Japan’s problem was that during the 1980s it was so addicted to investment-led growth and artificially cheap financing that it misallocated capital on a massive scale and failed to include the resulting implicit losses in its…