Your humble blogger is quoted at some length in this Playboy article (yes, article, remember the classic male wink and nod about buying Playboy for its articles) along with Bill Black. This piece was heralded in the New York Times. An excerpt: On the night of March 10, 2010 an otherwise anonymous American financial writer […]
Read more...By John Y Campbell, Adi Sunderam, and Luis M Viceira, first posted at VoxEU The historically low yields on Treasury bonds are the hallmark of a bubble, according to some commentators. This column analyses the relationship between bond yields, the stock market, and inflation over the past 50 years. It finds that the riskiness of […]
Read more...In Rudy Giuliani’s second term as mayor, the famed backer of law n’ order had a great fondness for taking it into his own hands. Groups that wanted to assemble on the steps of City Hall were required to file a notice or petition of some sort. A peculiar ritual would then ensue. The mayor’s […]
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. In the 1960s and 70s, an arm of the US government destroyed villages in Vietnam in order to save […]
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. Even prior to the financial crisis of 2007, economists and policymakers actively debated whether central banks should use interest […]
Read more...Yves here. This post cites a number of recent Western commentaries on China’s currency policies; I suggest, for one stop shopping, you read Martin Wolf comment, “Why America is going to win the global currency battle.” There are several points in the argument below that are curious, to say the least. One is the notion […]
Read more...The comment by Joseph Stiglitz in the Financial Times lambasting the Fed’s expected move to quantitative easing is certain to have no impact on the central bank’s course of action. His article nevertheless is proof that this idea is not as well received as the officialdom would like you to believe. It isn’t merely Stiglitz’s […]
Read more...By Satyajit Das a risk consultant and the author of the Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives During the European debt crisis, in a matter of days, the dollar strengthened by around 10%. The weakness of the Euro and resultant appreciation of the Renminbi by over 14% reduced […]
Read more...A couple of articles in the Wall Street Journal, reporting on a conference at the Boston Fed, indicates that some people at the Fed may recognize that the central bank has boxed itself in more than a tad. The first is on the question of whether the Fed is in a liquidity trap. A lot […]
Read more...After the in retrospect not that terrible first acute phase of the financial crisis, August-September 2007, this blog began taking note of Extreme Measures. These were proposals by respectable people for dealing with the burgeoning mess that were usually very creative and had zero chance of happening. The fact that so many normally sound people […]
Read more...By Marshall Auerback, a portfolio strategist and hedge fund manager who writes for New Deal 2.0 Although I have consistently taken the line that QE is totally useless, in effect an accounting trick which does little for real economic activity, I should have at least acknowledged its powers in terms of fomenting casino-like speculation in […]
Read more...The fact that an IMF meeting ended with the participants unable to feign a narrowing of differences on the currency front is further evidence that positions are hardening. And let us put none too fine a point on this: the currency row is simply an acceptable way to fight over imbalanced trade patterns. As we […]
Read more...A scan of various news stories shows obvious signs of continued jockeying on the currency front. Bloomberg reports that the BRICs (at least according to Russia) aren’t at all receptive to US efforts to weaken currency controls. The US position, as presented by Timothy Geithner, is that undervalued currencies (meaning the renminbi) produce can produce […]
Read more...By Marshall Auerback, a portfolio strategist who writes for New Deal 2.0 Something is very wrong with Japan. The Japanese economy has been much weaker than any other major economy for a while now: over the last business expansion, through the Great Recession, and in the recovery since the Great Recession trough. Japan’s business cycle […]
Read more...For those of you old enough to remember the Vietnam War, one of its aspects was an effort at what would now be called spin management. When Richard Nixon, who had promised in his 1968 Presidential campaign to exit the conflict but instead escalated it (the movie Patton had a bad effect on his decision […]
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