Need a Loan in China? Hand Over a Nude Photo
Lender demands in China as a sign of credit stress.
Read more...Category Archives: Economic fundamentals
Location, Location, Location: The Persistence of Fortune
Yves here. This intriguing paper curiously fails to consider how climate change can (will) affect the patterns they describe. And it also fails to give clues as to why some cities keep gaining population and income and others fall by the wayside. For instance, Atlanta and Birmingham, Alabama were of comparable size in the 1970s, […]
Read more...More Collateral Damage From Negative Interest Rates (Updated and Corrected)
Spain demonstrates some of the costs and dislocations created by negative interest rate policies.
Read more...Bond Market Flight to Safety as Investors Sweat Over Brexit Risk, Wobbly US Economy, Negative Rates
Investors got a big dose of bad news about the economy and geopolitics and reacted accordingly.
Read more...“Finance is Just Another Industry”
A debunkng of the claim that finance is special and should be treated accordingly.
Read more...Vancouver Mayor Mulls Empty Homes Tax
Vancouver ponders a long-overdue measure to target residential real estate warehousing.
Read more...Banks Rebel Against Negative Interest Rates
Banks have had it with negative interest rates and are starting to push back.
Read more...Michael Hudson: Millions Around the World Fleeing from Neoliberal Policy
Hudson tallies the high cost of neoliberal ideology.
Read more...Why So Many Americans Are Voting Against the Status Quo, in One Chart
This chart shows how much the bottom 90% has lost ground while the top 10% has pulled away.
Read more...Wolf Richter: What Makes This Jobs Report So Truly Ugly?
Last week’s job report was not only disconcerting in and of itself, but it also bodes ill for labor market prospects.
Read more...Steve Keen: Zombie-to-Be Economies and the Walking Dead of Debt Include China, South Korea, Canada, Finland
Steve Keen’s macroeconomic model allows him to identify zombies-in-the-making. It’s not pretty.
Read more...The Abandonment of Countercyclical Fiscal Policy
Economists bemoan the lack of aggressive fiscal spending after the crisis. Funny how few of them were willing to advocate it when it mattered.
Read more...Michael Pettis: China – How Much Investment is Optimal?
If China’s very low level of social capital has long ago made its investment strategy obsolete, that suggests that China has overinvested beyond its capacity to utilize these investments economically. Thus there are hidden losses on bank balance sheets created by the failure to write down physical capital to its true value. In this case Chinese growth cannot help but drop significantly as these losses are finally recognized and as investment levels are sharply curtailed.
Read more...Hoisted From Comments: Neoliberalism Tearing Societies Apart
The true destructiveness of neoliberalism is becoming more and more apparent.
Read more...Refinancing is Dead: A Generation of Hard Times Will Continue Until Secular Real Wages Improve
Real gains by average Americans won’t come financing gimmicks but from real growth in wages. And no one in authority seems willing to provide them.
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