writedowns

This week I am doing the weekly newsletter in two parts, both outside the paywall. This is part one. As Charles Wyplosz has recently written, the euro zone's rescue strategy adopted in May 2010 has failed. Like his column, this column…

Scott Barber of Reuters shows us with the chart below that over the last 30 years bad debt in Spain has tracked unemployment and moved inversely with GDP growth. The higher the percentage of doubtful loans is, the lower GDP growth and the…

I was on RT's Capital Account last night talking to Lauren Lyster about the euro zone debt crisis. At the end of the show, we came up against the deficit problem and the question about how it should be solved. I get frustrated by this topic…

Mindless austerity is losing policy credibility in some Eurozone nations. This column suggests governments shouldn’t mix long-term growth and fiscal discipline nor produce another Lisbon strategy. Instead, they should adopt a framework for…

Ireland dealt fairly quickly with its property market bubble by effectively and forcefully nationalizing and recapitalizing its banking sector. They clearly still have a serious problem on their hands, but the nation has been aggressive in…

The market has been focused on the negotiations over the private sector involvement in reducing Greece’s debt burden. Yet, the PSI is so yesterday. There are many moving parts and the PSI, which has dominated the market’s attention, is…

The media and some pseudo-analysts, and, surprisingly, even some investors, still don’t understand what the 21 percent haircut in the Greece bond restructuring is all about. The 21 percent touted about is simply the hypothetical…