Politics

I continue to anticipate a recovery in Europe in the second half of this year. The manufacturing PMI data that were released this morning suggest we could be in recovery before the end of the quarter. This makes me relatively upbeat about…

Argentina's official economic growth surprised analysts with a 7.8% year over year jump in May. But can the growth numbers be trusted?

The following are today's prepared remarks of the Semiannual Monetary Policy Report to the US Congress by US Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke. While the totality of Chairman Bernanke's remarks are not new, we have underlined and…

Daily Comments for 15 Jul 2013

In the past two weeks, a lot has happened in Europe. I would say the general tenor of the news flow has been downbeat. Nevertheless, I am mostly positive on Europe. I don't see an imminent eurozone breakup, nor do I see a further dip into…

The real challenges for China, if you believe in the social capital constraint, are not about maintaining high rates of growth in the short term but rather of raising the levels of social capital in China. This is much more difficult and…

The data flow out of Europe today is pretty bad. German factories orders missed and unemployment rose to record levels in France and Greece. Meanwhile the IMF admitted that Greece's delayed debt restructuring "provided a window for private…

Michael Pettis had a very good post out yesterday that focused on the sectoral balances within and across eurozone countries which I recommend. His point is that excess German savings driven by wage suppression was behind macro imbalances…

Earlier today I wrote a post on the free blog site about blaming Germany for the problems in the euro zone. I ended up defending the German political response and blaming the euro. Let me just add a bit of colour to that here.

Last year, we saw a sea change in official German policy regarding the euro crisis and inflation. The German government came out in favour of accepting higher inflation domestically in Germany as a sacrifice for eurozone wage and price…