I’m having a Dean Baker moment. Baker’s blog Beat the Press engages in short-form shreddings of the economic reporting of the day, with the New York Times and the Washington Post his favorite targets (for instance, Baker at least once a week criticizes the MSM for relying on forecasts from economists who failed to see […]
Read more...By Richard Alford, a former economist at the New York Fed. Since then, he has worked in the financial industry as a trading floor economist and strategist on both the sell side and the buy side. Low rates have a more powerful effect on driving financial assets than on driving the economy. -Jeremy Grantham, GM0 […]
Read more...By Rob Parenteau, CFA, sole proprietor of MacroStrategy Edge, editor of The Richebacher Letter, and a research associate of The Levy Economics Institute Reader note: please see yesterday’s post for a discussion of the fiscal balances map. As evident from the financial balances map, there are a whole range of possible combinations of current account […]
Read more...By Rob Parenteau, CFA, sole proprietor of MacroStrategy Edge, editor of The Richebacher Letter, and a research associate of The Levy Economics Institute The question of fiscal sustainability looms large at the moment – not just in the peripheral nations of the eurozone, but also in the UK, the US, and Japan. More restrictive fiscal […]
Read more...By Marshall Auerback, a fund manager and investment strategist who writes for New Deal 2.0. Usually, we dread the regular Congressional testimonies of the Fed Chairman. They generally constitute a mix of obfuscation on the part of Mr. Bernanke mixed with political grandstanding on the part of Congress. But occasionally, a glimmer of truth comes […]
Read more...Martin Wolf, the Financial Times’ highly respected chief economics commentor, weighs in with a pretty pessimistic piece tonight. This makes for a companion to Peter Boone and Simon Johnson’s Doomsday cycle post from yesterday. Let us cut to the chase of Wolf’s argument: Now, after the implosion, we witness the extraordinary rescue efforts. So what […]
Read more...Team Obama’s answer to all negative feedback from the real world is to treat it as a communication/PR problem. Repackage the product, put the “new, improved” message out on all available frequencies, and move on to the next “public is a chump” maneuver. As we noted yesterday, the brand mavens have been assigned to Timothy […]
Read more...I’m surprised the little conundrum has not dawned on the officialdom sooner. Any return to safer practices means less leverage and less freely available credit. Less freely available credit, short term and maybe even intermediate term, means less rapid growth (with a binge as big as we had, the drying-out will take time), although it […]
Read more...By Marshall Auerback, a fund manager and investment strategist who writes for New Deal 2.0 and Yves Smith Conventional wisdom holds that the Chinese are due (as in overdue) for a revaluation of their currency, the renminbi. For instance, a recent report from Goldman argues that China will raise the value of the RMB against […]
Read more...The latest move in the “so what are we gonna do about Greece?” EU vs. Greece drama was that Greece was playing non-negotiable, saying it had agreed to reduce its fiscal deficit by 4% of GDP (from over 12.7% to 8.7%) and it was premature to talk about doing more at this juncture. That posture […]
Read more...Several readers pointed to a recent post by Michael Pettis, which mainly discussed how expected wage increases in China are a hopeful sign that China is taking steps to become more consumption-oriented. But as much as this is a move forward, changing the mix of China’s composition of demand is at least a decade-long project […]
Read more...A fair number of policy commentators are hewing to the view that somehow the EU will cobble together some sort of solution to the Greek fiscal mess because the alternatives look vasty worse. As Paul Krugman noted: Now what? A breakup of the euro is very nearly unthinkable, as a sheer matter of practicality. As […]
Read more...As readers no doubt know all too well, the market premium versus safer ones contracts in robust times and widens in downturns. And since credit markets typically signal downturns months before the equity markets, junk bonds are one place to look for advance warnings of changes in economic fortunes (albeit with a risk of false […]
Read more...The markets did not react well to the Friday combo plate of weaker than expected European growth, Chinese tightening ahead of the anticipated schedule, and less than convincing remarks regarding what if anything the EU intends to do about its little looming sovereign debt crisis. And top it off by having Greece PM Papandreou launch […]
Read more...Can someone shut these banking industry narcissists up? The one and only time I met Steve Schwarzman was in 1986, when he and Pete Peterson had just started the Blackstone Group. I was a manager (meaning a mid level working oar) at McKinsey. We had teed up a deal and were assisting our foreign client […]
Read more...