By Tim Iacono, who publishes a weekly investment newsletter on natural resources and the blog The Mess That Greenspan Made It seems that, once again, former Fed Chief Alan Greenspan has grown tired of listening to his critics who have increasingly laid blame at his feet for the inflation of (and, more importantly, the subsequent […]
Read more...On the one hand, as we noted in an earlier post, EU president Herman Van Rompuy has made no bones about his view that the EU needs to have more clout in economic affairs. Per the Telegraph: Herman Van Rompuy, the EU’s new president, has submitted a text calling for the creation of an “economic […]
Read more...Equities and commodities markets rallied on the belief that Greece would be rescued, and that notion is increasingly looking accurate. The Telegraph provides an update (hat tip Swedish Lex): Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany’s finance minister, has asked officials to prepare a plan in time for a summit of EU leaders on Thursday, according to reports in […]
Read more...We remarked last week that the FDIC had put forward a proposal for fixing the securitization market. To be a bit more precise, it was the FDIC’s plan, put forward for public comment, of the rules it wanted to have in place for banks to get “safe harbor”, meaning off balance sheet treatment, for their […]
Read more...The article tonight at Bloomberg, “No Job Growth for Small Business Spurs Recovery Doubt,” is a bit surprising, because so many of the people quoted in the article seem….surprised. It appears to have suddenly dawned on some economists and commentators that small concerns aren’t adding jobs, and that might have broader ramifications. What is peculiar […]
Read more...Two readers, Don B and Marshall Auerback, pointed to a Ambrose Evans-Pritchard story at the Telegraph which argues the the sovereign debt perturbations have the potential to have ramifications as serious as the subprime/Alt-A crisis. Now Evans-Pritchard has a tendency to the apocalyptic, but he also made some astute calls in 2007 and 2008 (as […]
Read more...Let’s acknowledge the obvious: there are a lot of not trivial impediments to reining in the banking industry: the deregulation policies that put a comparatively small number of firms in charge of infrastructure critical to commerce; the fact that said firms have done a very good job at disguising the rents they collect; that those […]
Read more...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 […]
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