private sector debt

A recent post by Matthew Klein on central banks over at FT Alphaville that dovetails with some of the themes I have been writing about here at Credit Writedowns for the past decades is what preciputated this post. Let me summarize my thesis…

Now that the Greek crisis has died down, we can return to surveying the global economy for clues as to whether global growth will continue unabated. My sense right now is that the major theme to watch remains policy divergence, with the US…

Major advanced economies have made mixed progress in repairing the private sector’s balance sheets. This column explores private sector deleveraging trends and calls for a set of policies that will return debt to safer levels. Monetary…

This is going to be a short thought piece. But the takeaway should be that the convergence to zero will continue unabated as the threat of inflation is muted given the combination of excess capacity, high private debt and unfavourable…

The 2014 BIS Annual Report warns again about the perils of ultra-easy monetary policy as it did in the lead-up to the Great Financial Crisis. I think the BIS could prove a Cassandra here and will explain below. Nevertheless, many refuse to…

Larry Sum­mers’ take on sec­u­lar stag­na­tion looks like it will be the flavour of the month for Amer­i­can econ­o­mists for the fore­see­able future, I have to take it more seri­ously. Hence this more serious post for my first column in…

We need to abandon the Loanable Funds model of lending, which treats banks as “mere intermediaries” and therefore ignores them in macroeconomics. the Neoclassical belief in Loanable Funds is the biggest barrier there is to the development…

Private and public debt in the Eurozone increased since the 2000s, and especially so in certain countries. This column presents evidence that high levels of private and public debt, together with deleveraging of all sectors, are especially…

Over the past couple of years it has gradually become the consensus view that QE has failed because it hasn’t created the economic growth that everyone was hoping for. I find that view overly simplistic and naïve in equal measures. QE - or…

One of the most contentious topics in America is the impact of the Federal Reserve’s policy of “Quantitative Easing” – otherwise known as ‘QE’. The Federal Reserve has committed to spending $85 billion every month buying a wide range of…