After the months of buoyant markets, a return to crisis-type headlines seems troublingly familiar, even though the perturbations of the last day or so are a pale shadow of the worst months of the crisis. And some are making the bull case. For instance, a headline at Clusterstock trumpetss, “Yesterday’s Bloodshed Sent The VIX Soaring […]
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. There was a long period of time during which I believed that Mr. Bernanke should have resigned the Chairmanship […]
Read more...Ambrose Evans-Pritchard today has his usual type of offering: extreme, but nevertheless based on a valid observation, on his favorite hobbyhorse, the EMU. His key observation comes at the end: EMU architects were warned in the early 1990s that monetary union would prove unworkable as constructed. They scoffed, sure that any crisis could be exploited […]
Read more...By Marshall Auerback, a fund manager and investment strategist who writes for New Deal 2.0. If nothing else, it’s clear (as one wag wrote this morning) that the state of Obama’s rhetoric is strong. The President almost always gives a good speech, but it’s the follow-through that is generally problematic. And the speech itself sends […]
Read more...By Stephanie Kelton, Associate Professor of Economics, University of Missouri-Kansas City My colleague and fellow blogger, Randy Wray, has just argued that President Obama should scrap the speech he’s planning to deliver tonight and surprise the American people with something entirely different. I couldn’t agree more. And while I agree that job creation must be […]
Read more...Patrick Chovanek, who writes from China, features an South China Morning Post story on his blog that helps give a better sense of the scale of overinvestment in real estate projects in China than isolated pictures of large, empty buildings. Data, of course, would be nice, but the Chinese officialdom specializes in misleading statistics. From […]
Read more...By Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns As I indicated in my post Grading Obama’s economic policy after one year, I see the President as a triangulating center-left politician of the Bill Clinton variety. The reason we have seen public policy which has been favorable to big business and reactive to events on the ground during this […]
Read more...By Steve Keen, Associate Professor of Economics & Finance at the University of Western Sydney and author of Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor of the Social Sciences The US Senate should not reappoint Ben Bernanke. As Obama’s reaction to the loss of Ted Kennedy’s old seat showed, real change in policy only occurs after political […]
Read more...By Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns The Democratic defeat in yesterday’s Massachusetts Senate race puts a punctuation mark on the grinding erosion of support for the Obama Administration and its economic policy in a tough first year. Clearly voters were sending the Administration a message that America is on the wrong course with Obama’s poll […]
Read more...Before you dismiss the headline as nutty, at least one respected macroeconomist and former central banker, and now chief economist of Citigroup is of the view that England is at risk of a currency crisis. He noted last November: With the pound sterling dropping like a stone against most other currencies and credit default swap […]
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. A week ago, in Atlanta, Bernanke responded to his critics, including John Taylor of Taylor Rule fame (the Taylor […]
Read more...I must say, it’s quite amusing to watch Simon Johnson. He has an unabashedly bearish message…for 2010! And he delivers it in a sunny, enthusiastic tone. His hosts are not too keen about it, but the fact that he is so bloody upbeat about his gloomsterism leaves them a bit flummoxed.
Read more...Although investors have been worried about the Fed’s exit strategy for some time, you wouldn’t see much evidence if you looked at the markets. While gold prices are an exception, the stock market appears to reflect optimism about recovery (although cynics would say it really is a function of liquidity, not fundamental views). Either premature […]
Read more...Last week, Pimco’s CEO said that he doesn’t think we’ll have a v-shaped recovery, and that economists, advisors and managers who have been counting on a v-shaped recovery are ignoring the economic fundamentals in our economy. Now, Paul Krugman is agreeing: Plunging prices of houses and CDOs … don’t produce any corresponding macroeconomic silver lining. […]
Read more...We put up a post in late December which keyed off a discussion by Patrick Chovanec . Chovanec argued that real estate was increasingly serving as a vehicle for speculation, with many units kept vacant by investors: In China, however, “flipping” is not the problem. Some people may be engaged in short-term ”flipping,” but as […]
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