taxes

Responding to press conference questions, ECB President Mario Draghi has said the ECB is ‘technically ready’ to bring interest rates below zero. WHat do negative interest rates do? The explanation is here.

Abenomics has been very successful in goosing the Japanese economy thus far. However, the question remains whether this success will be short-lived or durable. I believe it is likely to be short-lived because of the policy constraints that…

The capital outflow from the emerging markets is proving as destabilizing as the previous inflows. Pundits can talk about currency wars all they want, but the real issue is the ability to cope with volatile capital flows, which is the…

One of the striking aspects of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations hearing on Apple's aggressive tax-avoidance strategies is the way the Senators bent over backwards to declare Apple love even as they poked and prodded at…

The first left-right coalition in Italy since 1946 has survived its first confidence motion in both chambers. As difficult as it may have been to break the political logjam, the hard work lies ahead for Prime Minister Letta.

A recent FT article points out that the electoral campaign positioning has already started. And it has the Social Democrats in bed with the Green Party to an unusual degree. The way the Greens and the SPD are talking makes me believe it…

Here is the video of an interview I did with Max Keiser on the situation in Europe. A lot of our discussion revolves around why the Germans actually do want a cohesive Europe but feel compelled to pursue the present policy path. We also…

In all of the bailed out nations of the euro zone, sovereign default is the worry as this can create a cascading knock-on effect like the failure of Creditanstalt in 1931 that ushered in the banking crisis of the Great Depression. We see…

Today Cyprus voted to reject the deposit tax with 36 MPs voting against and 19 abstaining. One MP was absent. No one voted for the deposit tax. And so this trial balloon of bailing in insured depositors has crashed and burned spectacularly.…

The Cypriot banking system is insolvent. Heaping private losses onto taxpayers is bad public policy. Let's start with those two statements, because starting there makes clear that forcing losses onto bank creditors was the only choice in…