Reader Michael sent a host of updates on China, which might collectively be called, “Lousy China News Wrap.” And I don’t think he was cherry picking The eye-catching one was a coded story on capital flight from China, “China warns of risks from “abnormal” cross-border capital flow,” from Xinhua. The reason that capital is exiting […]
Read more...Although Manhattan real estate is an expected casualty of the financial carnage, it nevertheless serves as a useful, albeit lagging indicator of the depth of distress. Even though residential purchases have fallen over the last year, the price impact (so far) has been muted. That is in part due to the fact that 2007 was […]
Read more...Many readers are not keen about the idea of a fiscal stimulus program (I presume they are of the Austrian view, that taking the pain, no matter how bad, is the better course of action. And your humble blogger believes that stimulus without cleaning up our broken financial system is likely to have blunted impact). […]
Read more...I am a big fan of Willem Buiter, even on those rare occasions when he is wrong. He is unusually blunt for a Serious Economist, and is willing to take on orthodox views and institutions frontally. He has, for instance, been quite critical of the Fed. He created a firestorm at its last conference in […]
Read more...The Wall Street Journal has sent a news alert that says that Obama is mulling a stimulus plan that will rely more heavily on tax cuts than initially envisaged as a way to win needed Republican support. The Journal says tax cuts could be as much as $310 billion, or 40%, of a total package […]
Read more...Although the Fed has resorted to increasingly unconventional approaches for combatting our financial crisis, one it has used that is widely endorsed is the generous provision of liquidity. Luis I. Jácome H. in a VoxEU post, contends that the liberal use of central bank liquidity to stanch crises actually increased instability. One issue that will […]
Read more...This is the sort of post Dean Baker often writes, “New York Times features economists who missed the housing downturn,” although this time, the subject is the outlook for 2009. Now in fairness, the author, Louis Uchitelle, puts in far more caveats than one normally sees in this sort of piece. In fact, it could […]
Read more...Falling fuel prices and penny pinching consumers are not a plus for energy-saving technology, particularly the big ticket variety. And the latest auto sales figures complicate the plans of those who’d push Detroit towards making hybrids as one of the bailout concessions. From the Financial Times: US hybrid petro-electric sales in November shrank 53 per […]
Read more...Economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff have been publishing various findings from a large-scale data set they have constructed of past financial crises. They have looked back as far as 800 years, but not surprisingly, most of their output has consisted of analyses of modern crises (you can find some earlier discussions here and here). […]
Read more...Wolfgang Munchau has a good piece in todays’ Financial Times delineating his economic policy wish list for 2009. It has the merit of being to the point and pragmatic. His preamble contains some some striking tidbits. Munchau considers himself relatively optimistic about US housing, despite anticipating a 40 to 50% peak to trough decline, and […]
Read more...The run-up to Christmas sales levels in the US failed to meet low expectations. Now retailers are hoping for a wee bit of salvation in after-Christmas clearance. From Bloomberg: Cutbacks on clothing, electronics and jewelry led U.S. retail sales to drop as much as 4 percent this holiday season as consumers limited purchases to necessities, […]
Read more...Since I am endeavoring to spend some time with my family, forgive me for dispatching this New York Times story, “Dollar Shift: Chinese Pockets Filled as Americans’ Emptied.” The article buys, hook, line and sinker, then- Fed-governor Ben Bernanke’s depiction of so-called global imbalances (the US borrowing from abroad to fund overconsumption; Japan, China, Taiwan, […]
Read more...A not-so-bad Black Friday led retailers to hope that the Christmas selling season might not be as awful as feared. Unfortunately, sales appeared to have petered out in the typically busy last few selling days, in part due to rotten weather in the northern part of the country. From Bloomberg: U.S. retail store traffic fell […]
Read more...In part because the Japanese corporate bond market is no where near as deep and large as its US counterpart, Japanese rating agencies hold far less sway than Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s. Nevertheless, the idea that Japan should write down its vast holdings of Treasuries and support US infrastructure spending (albeit with a few […]
Read more...I am now wondering if Google censors posts (I use Blogger), I put this post up at 1:33 AM, and even had a reader e-mail me that the post had disappeared (with no listing in “Recent Posts” which happens if I put up a post and then remove it). I have a record that it […]
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