Author Archives: Edward Harrison

About Edward Harrison

I am a banking and finance specialist at the economic consultancy Global Macro Advisors. Previously, I worked at Deutsche Bank, Bain, the Corporate Executive Board and Yahoo. I have a BA in Economics from Dartmouth College and an MBA in Finance from Columbia University. As to ideology, I would call myself a libertarian realist - believer in the primacy of markets over a statist approach. However, I am no ideologue who believes that markets can solve all problems. Having lived in a lot of different places, I tend to take a global approach to economics and politics. I started my career as a diplomat in the foreign service and speak German, Dutch, Swedish, Spanish and French as well as English and can read a number of other European languages. I enjoy a good debate on these issues and I hope you enjoy my blogs. Please do sign up for the Email and RSS feeds on my blog pages. Cheers. Edward http://www.creditwritedowns.com

Dumb things bloggers say

Alright, I have a mea culpa here. Check out this quote from June 2008: Bank of America’s Ken Lewis is trying to crack a big nut in taking on Countrywide Financial to its balance sheet. To date, BofA has been fairly successful in limiting its writedowns during this credit crisis, but there are any number […]

Read more...

ECRI: “It’s Too Late” for Obama on Jobs

Cross-posted from Credit Writedowns Economic Cycle Research Institute co-founder Lakshman Achuthan was on Tech Ticker yesterday discussing the outlook for the economy. Business Insider does a good write-up of his commentary, highlighting the fact that the ECRI has yet to signal a double dip. However, I wanted to add a few comments as well. ECRI’s […]

Read more...

Summer rerun: Misunderstanding Modern Monetary Theory

This is a post I wrote last summer clarifying some points that I have learned about Modern Monetary Theory. The genesis of the post was a gross mischaracterization of Modern Money Theory (MMT) by Paul Krugman in a piece called “I Would Do Anything For Stimulus, But I Won’t Do That (Wonkish)”, which Paul Krugman […]

Read more...

On the ECB and the sovereign debt crisis

Cross-posted from Credit Writedowns Last month I wrote an article called “The ECB is the difference” which claimed the ECB was the pivotal institution in the European sovereign debt crisis. I presented two options that the European Central Bank had in relieving pressure on European sovereign debt markets. Option A was monetisation i.e. buying up […]

Read more...

Permanent zero is official policy

Cross-posted from Credit Writedowns Today, the Federal Reserve told us that interest rates will remain at zero percent for two more years, making official the policy I have dubbed permanent zero. In response we saw a massive rally in treasuries starting at about 225PM ET and equities starting at about 240PM ET as interest rate […]

Read more...

Pro-cyclical fiscal policy

Cross-posted from Credit Writedowns Looking up the term procyclical on the Internet, I see the Wikipedia entry defines it as: Procyclical is a term used in economics to describe how an economic quantity is related to economic fluctuations. It is the opposite of countercyclical… In business cycle theory and finance, any economic quantity that is […]

Read more...

GDP numbers make double dip threat real

Cross-posted from Credit Writedowns I have stopped reporting the quarterly GDP numbers but this last reading bears mentioning. The US Bureau of Economic Analysis reported the following at 830AM ET: Real gross domestic product — the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States — increased at an […]

Read more...

ECRI expects ‘double dip scare’

Cross-posted from Credit Writedowns Below is a video of Lakshman Achuthan, co-founder and chief operations officer of the Economic Cycle Research Institute (ECRI), talking about the economic outlook for the US. I profiled Achuthan’s views on a broad US slowdown when I wrote in May about why a global slowdown will hit by summer. Now […]

Read more...

Summer rerun – If the US stopped issuing treasuries, would it go broke?

This is another summer rerun piece. I wrote the following post “If the U.S. stopped issuing treasuries, would it go broke?” in November 2009. At the time, I was getting to grip with how the government designed constraints in order to prevent deficit spending. What was and still is clear to me is that while […]

Read more...

Kohl: Angela “is destroying my Europe”

Cross-posted from Credit Writedowns According to Der Spiegel, Helmut Kohl, the father of a unified Germany and the German politician most responsible for the single currency, is very unhappy with his protégé Angela Merkel. I found this article to be consistent with what I have heard for months about the Kohl-Waigel generation’s feelings about Merkel’s […]

Read more...

The debt ceiling debate as viewed from Europe

Here’s what Germany’s largest daily newspaper Bild Zeitung has to say about the politics in the US around the debt ceiling: "Playing poker is part of politics, as is theatrical posturing. That’s fair enough. But what America is currently exhibiting is the worst kind of absurd theatrics. And the whole world is being held hostage. […]

Read more...

Summer Rerun: Why we shouldn’t use monetary policy to stimulate aggregate demand

Hi all. Here’s another summer re-run I wanted to post at NC, but this time from Marshall Auerback. As you know, there has been a heated debate amongst economists as to what policy makers should do if anything about the loss of jobs and the attendant fall in demand and output in the wake of […]

Read more...