savings

The average interest rate for a savings account today is 0.45%. It wasn't that long ago that one could easily earn 5% in a well-chosen savings account, like those offered by ING Direct, or bump that up by a point or two by putting money…

This is a gold level post. According to the US Bureau of labor Statistics, nonfarm payroll employment rose by 227,000 in February, and the unemployment rate was unchanged at 8.3 percent. Here are my thoughts on what this signals about the…

I caught this comment by Scott Fulwiler on a blog post a 3spoken: the notion that firms can spend and reduce net saving in order to increase net saving of the household sector--while theoretically true and true in an accounting…

The country's economy will now shrink because European policy makers fail to understand the dynamics of debt deflation.

If you are a retiree, you're not happy these days. Five years ago, you were getting a decent return on your fixed income investments. But since then, the Fed has trashed the fixed income market by reducing interest rates to zero percent for…

Last week we showed that government deficits lead to an equivalent amount of nongovernment savings. The nongovernment savings created will be held in claims on government. Normally, the nongovernment sector prefers to hold that much of that…

Here are a few excerpts from Stephen Roach’s latest at Project Syndicate.

Recipients of government spending can hold receipts in the form of a bank deposit, can withdraw cash, or can use the deposit to spend on goods, services, or assets. In the first case, no further portfolio effects occur. In the second case,…

Below is a video of my appearance on RT International last night discussing the recent bill to authorise sanctions against the Chinese for currency manipulation. I see this bill as all about the politics and little about the economics.

I don’t ascribe that much importance to confidence data as a leading indicator. Moreover, as we saw during the 2000s, low consumer savings can bolster GDP growth for quite a long time. Nevertheless, I agree with the underlying message here,…