savings

By Frances Coppola I do like sectoral net lending charts. This one is from the OBR's latest Economic Forecast: The thing to remember about sectoral balances is they must sum to zero. It is not possible to have a negative external…

By Andrea Terzi originally published at Social Europe and republished with consent of Author The anti-austerity vote in the European elections reflected two different kinds of discontent. One is a feeling of frustration, which is…

By Michael Pettis Debate about the global savings glut hypothesis is mired in confusion, a fundamental one of which is the seemingly obvious but false claim that a global savings glut must lead to higher global savings. Here, for example,…

This is a loaded topic. This entry, however, is not intended to be political. Very few things in economics are good or bad in themselves, but rather can be good under certain conditions or bad under others. I want to try to tease out as…

In order to understand much of what is happening in China it is important to understand how financial systems operate under condition of financial repression. Because most of what we know about economics is derived from economists whose…

The German-language media have been voicing concerns over the ECB’s low interest-rate policy and its effect on savings and investment in the euro zone. This makes sense given the state of the economy in Germany and Austria is significantly…

debt matters, even if it is possible to pretend for many years that it doesn’t (and this pretense was made possible by the implicit capitalization of debt-servicing costs). Japan never really wrote down all or even most of its investment…

"Not all government debt is created equal. We have bad deficits and good deficits. Good deficits are used to fund investments that will have a positive rate of return, properly determined. Those contribute to GDP."

It is still too early for all of these predictions either to have materialized or to have failed, but I thought it might be useful to review them to see whether or not they have been reasonably accurate in describing unfolding events and,…

Recent developments in the Eurozone, specifically Cyprus where the first EU-dictated bail-in of bank depositors took place, brought to light an important issue which had been hiding in the shadows: the flawed nature of current deposit…