Problems in the banking sector played a seriously damaging role in the Great Recession. In fact, they continue to. Macroeconomic models failed to explain the interaction between banks and the macro economy. The problem lies with thinking that banks create loans out of existing resources. Instead, they create new money in the form of loans. The traditional model greatly understates bank and macroeconomic risk.
Read more...A Eurogroup meeting ended if anything with Greece and its creditors even more alienated from each other.
Read more...It’s now becoming cutting edge conventional wisdom that oversized financial service industries are bad for your economic health. Yet the media is only occasionally and timidly is willing to say that what is good for Jamie Dimon is bad for the rest of us.
Read more...The alarming part of the deadlock between Greece and its lenders is the lack of a plan on the creditor side to develop a Plan B, a sort of mirror image of the Greek government’s claim that its has bet everything on securing a favorable agreement.
Read more...What’s at stake: Rather than being unified by the application of the common behavioral model of the rational agent, economists increasingly recognize themselves in the careful application of a common empirical toolkit used to tease out causal relationships, creating a premium for papers that mix a clever identification strategy with access to new data.
Read more...Both sides in the Greece/creditor negotiations have said they have reached the limits of what they are prepared to give.
Read more...How arrogant ignorance has squandered the US position of world leadership.
Read more...China’s oil consumption is a bigger part of global demand than most analysts acknowledge. A slowdown in buying after China stopped stockpiling diesel for the summer Olympics was a proximate cause of the 2008 oil bust. China is again in a stockpiling phase, which could precede another not-well-anticipated demand drop.
Read more...Debunking “free trade” and other spurious defenses of the multinational enrichment, democracy stripmining programs known as the Trade in Services Agreement, the TransPacific Partnership, and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.
Read more...America’s current leadership has failed to grasp the significance of a radical global change underway inside the Eurasian land mass. If China succeeds in linking its rising industries to the vast natural resources of the Eurasian heartland, then quite possibly, as Sir Halford Mackinder predicted on that cold London night in 1904, “the empire of the world would be in sight.”
Read more...Some observers thought that Greece might get a break in the G-7 summit this weekend. While the G-7 has one more day to run, the statements coming out of the summit strongly and uniformly back the creditor position.
Read more...Greece has already offered to continue with a program of significant austerity. No wonder the creditors are close to agreeing to that part of the government’s proposal.
Read more...As Tsipras’ options narrow thanks to the revolt in his party, it is also becoming harder for even Merkel to forestall a default.
Read more...As Greece’s cash crunch continues and its negotiations are moving slowing and tending towards an impasse, it becomes more and more likely that the beleaguered borrower will issue some sort of scrip in order to fund operations while remaining in the Eurozone. How and how well might that work?
Read more...Is the august Wall Street Journal hinting that the “recovery” has no clothes?
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