A post by Edward Harrison I am going to talk here a little bit about the looming trade war between China and the United States. But I am going to come at it from a side angle via some historical analogies. Common folklore in the United States says that the Soviet Empire collapsed in large […]
Read more...The Financial Times’ Martin Wolf gives a cogent and sober assessment of what he deems to be a destructive refusal to adjust policies on behalf of the world’s two biggest exporters, China and Germany. The problem is that both simultaneously want to have their cake and eat it too. As we stressed in a recent […]
Read more...By Tim Duncan, Chairman of American Business Leaders for Financial Reform Financial regulatory reform was starting to feel a lot like a political version of the movie Groundhog Day. Like Bill Murray’s character in the movie – forced inexplicably to live the same day over and over until he learned from his mistakes – the […]
Read more...In case you somehow harbored the notion that the other half doesn’t live differently than the rest of us, an eye-opening report released by the Insight Center for Community Economic Development, “Lifting as We Climb,” analyzes a topic that too often gets short shrift, the net worth, or “wealth” of the lower economic strata. The […]
Read more...Gretchen Morgenson has a fair number of critics among readers of this blog, which I think is a tad unfortunate. Most of her articles are in fact sound; she is very reliable on executive comp, anything in the equity markets, or where she is working form legal documents, generally lawsuits. It’s when she wanders into […]
Read more...By Edward Harrison This is the third in a series of posts about ideas for financial reform generated by the “Make Markets Be Markets” conference I attended yesterday in New York City on 3 Mar 2010. You can download all of the written presentations here. A century ago, anyone with a bathtub and some chemicals […]
Read more...I felt certain when I read the Financial Times headline, “Proposal sees consumer watchdog role for Fed,” that I must have woken up in a bizarre parallel universe (but that is probably unfair to pretty much all universes parallel to ours: I imagine it would be very difficult to have one more perverse than ours). […]
Read more...Credit default swaps played a much more central role in the financial crisis than is widely understood, and they continue to get a free pass in financial reform proposals that they do not deserve. As we have discussed on this blog, and recount in more detail in the book ECONNED, central clearing and/or putting them […]
Read more...Consider: if we are starting to see signs of resistance to austerity measures in the US, it would suggest that they are not going to go over too well in other countries that have debt overhangs either. Defaults and/or restructurings are usually more palatable, politically. And before suggesting that bondholders won’t stand for it, guess […]
Read more...Bloomberg reports that former Treasury Secretary and Citigroup board member Robert Rubin will be summoned before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in April, with Alan Greenspan and Chuck Prince likely to be tapped as well. On the one hand, it’s a welcome sign that the FCIC will be interviewing many of the major figures responsible […]
Read more...The Wall Street Journal is not the first to comment on the magnitude of the wagers against the euro (the Financial Times took note nearly two weeks ago: “Speculators raise record bets against euro“). But the Journal offers a spectacle sure to inflame sentiment in Europe: that of major hedge funds feasting first on lemon-roasted […]
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...Kenneth Rogoff, former IMF chief economist warned that a series of sovereign debt defaults is likely to be in the offing. From Bloomberg: Following banking crises, “we usually see a bunch of sovereign defaults, say in a few years. I predict we will again,” Rogoff,…said at a forum in Tokyo today. He said financial markets […]
Read more...By Marshall Auerback, a fund manager and investment strategist and L. Randall Wray, a Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City In recent weeks there has been much discussion about what to do about Greece. These questions become all the more relevant as the country attempts to float a multibillion-euro bond issue later […]
Read more...From “Financial Economics, Deregulation and OTC Derivatives: Interview with Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism,” The Institutional Risk Analyst, February 22, 2010 “Wall Street once ran from a graveyard to a river. It now runs from an ocean to an ocean, and beyond. It has become, in Dr. Charles A. Beard’s measured words, a new Appian […]
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