savings

Upon first reading what I am pasting below, my thesis councillor briskly claimed that this particular piece of text represented a malignant tumor that had to be surgically removed if the patient (in this case, my master's thesis) were to…

By Marshall Auerback and Edward Harrison. Marshall's view Ed has asked me to deal specifically with the issue of Ricardian equivalence, the theorem used by anti-government proponents to argue that fiscal deficits are counterproductive and…

Frederick Sheehan is the author of Panderer to Power: The Untold Story of How Alan Greenspan Enriched Wall Street and Left a Legacy of Recession  (McGraw-Hill, 2009). There is no end of economists, analysts, and reporters filling the…

Excerpts from Comstock's latest weekly: Debt is discussed by the pundits on financial TV also, but in almost every case the discussion revolves around government deficits relative to GDP or government debt relative to GDP.  They…

Just three days after returning to Beijing from New York, I had to leave again, this time to a series of conferences in Torino, Italy, so it is hard to do much writing for my blog, especially since I won’t spend my free time in the hotel…

Actually, our tussle hasn’t only been with the research institutes, and the bank analysts, from time to time we have also engaged with some of the better known cases of mainstream journalism, as, for example in the case of The Economist,…

The BEA released US personal income and consumption figures for March today.  The data show that the growth in consumption continues to outstrip the growth in personal income. Personal income increased $36.0 billion, or 0.3…

At the end of last month I proffered three potential explanations for the continued fall in the US savings rate.   The first explanation was that the economy was in a cyclical recovery predicated on asset price inflation and this…

In a week where the deck of cards that make up the Eurozone got its so far largest jolt and where there is now not only an imminent danger of a total economic collapse in Greece but also, much more worryingly, signs that Germany herself is…

Michael Pettis is out with another great piece on the likelihood that non-performing loans (NPLs) will rise in China when the present spate of malinvestment comes a-cropper.  What caught my eye were his statements about the hidden ways…