Politics

Hope may spring eternal, but the presidential victor in 2012 will dictate an economic policy that is stuck in the mud. What then, will break unsustainable imbalances and market interference? Lacking an untoward event, we will wait for the…

The mood has turned against austerity in the euro zone because it is now rightly seen as anti-growth. The question is what next. Here I will hazard a few predictions of where euro zone policy is headed including a EuroTARP.

The agenda in the euro zone is changing. The likely outcome of the weekend elections in Greece and France are just as much an effect as a cause of the shift in the agenda. For the first time since the crisis began, the German insistence on…

I thought now would be a good time to see how my ten surprises for 2012 are tracking as we are nearly a third of the way through the year. I posted these as my first weekly newsletter and these are events that have 1-in-3 odds of happening…

The string of developments has encouraged risk-off behavior. Equity markets are lower. Core bonds are higher. The high beta currencies, such as the freely traded emerging market currencies, the Australian and Canadian dollars, the euro,…

Seven weeks of government negotiations in the Netherlands to agree on new austerity measures failed on Saturday suggesting the German-led program for Europe is about to take head of another government and this is on the eve of the first…

The French premium over Germany rose today to a three-month high. Rumors of a rating downgrade proved wide of the mark, but it reflects the market's anxiety about the outlook for France going forward.

I think this should be obvious to everyone by now, but peak oil is a clear factor in the Argentina/Spain oil crisis. Here's what happened.

April 9, 2012 is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the most infamous savings and loan fraud, Charles Keating’s, successful use of five U.S. Senators to escape sanction for a massive violation of the law. The Senators were Alan Cranston (D.…

The yen was the weakest of the major currencies in Q1, losing about 7.2% against the dollar. There was a clear shift in both speculative and portfolio flows. This is just one of seven observations about the Yen via Marc Chandler.