John Hussman is always worth reading, and his current missive is a hum-dinger. I’m extracting some key bits below, and urge you to read it in full. Note that Hussman is far from alone in chiding the Fed for encroaching on Constitutionally-mandated budget processes, including former central bankers. From Willem Buiter: As regards democratic accountability […]
Read more...The Fed seems to have decided to split a loaf on the conservative side, coming in with less QE than the market’s hopes, at $600 billion, but one might cynically surmise above the low end expectation of $500 billion. Side by side comparison of this FOMC statement with the next most recent courtesy Andrew Horowitz […]
Read more...Before readers throw brickbats at me, I’m just acting as the messenger for two articles, one by Harvard’s Kenneth Rogoff, the other by the Financial Times’ Martin Wolf. Each points out that the US is taking a proportionately bigger hit than other big economies post crisis, particularly in terms of unemployment. And this is actually […]
Read more...The contradictions of the Eurobailout mechanism were bound to be resolved at some point, smoke and mirror and insufficient firepower relative to the magnitude of the problem will only take you so far. The eurozone rescue operation, although it looked like it was aimed at so called Club Med, aka PIGS sovereigns (Portugal, Ireland, Greece, […]
Read more...The recent jousting between the US and China had the look of a full on row. And the spectacle at last weekend’s G20 seemed to offer further confirmation, with Geithner proposing a cap on current account surpluses that was aimed at China above all. But now the Financial Times tells us that relations are already […]
Read more...When we’ve discussed the woes afflicting residential mortgage securitizations, in particular, the deep seated problems arising from the frequent if not widespread failure of the original parties to the deal to take the steps stipulated in their own agreements needed to convey the notes (the borrower’s promissory note) to the securitization legal vehicle, a trust. […]
Read more...By Yiping Huang, Professor of Economics at the China Center for Economic Research, Peking University. Cross-posted from VoxEU. On 19 October, the People’s Bank of China announced a series of rate hikes. This column argues that the moves were aimed at combating domestic inflation and avoiding the mistakes of Japan in the 1980s. On 19 […]
Read more...By Jim Quinn, who writes at The Burning Platform As I listen to pundits, politicians and populists expound on the jobs situation in our country day after day, as if they knew what they were talking about, I’m reminded of the Seinfeld episode where George quits his job as a real estate agent. He sits […]
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...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...Yves here. I did a small study for a then midlevel, now top level Russian oligarch in the early 1990s who bought a US retail chain. It wasn’t exactly the most astute purchase. One of the factoids I came across in assisting him in figuring out how to scrub it up for resale was the […]
Read more...As Satyajit Das remarked, our post global financial crisis malaise has some troubling elements in common with Japan’s post bubble era. One biggie is denial of the seriousness of the hangover, which per Das lasted for five years in Japan. The bizarre aspect of the crisis response in the US was the speed and recklessness […]
Read more...A brief recap of a couple of useful sighting on the “rising anxieties in Europe” front. Edward Hugh has a very thorough update (bond spread trends, underlying drivers, an astute discussion of politics) leavened by a great deal of wry humor (“So, like former US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson before them, Europe’s leaders, having armed […]
Read more...A lot of commentators, including your truly, took issue with the NBER announcement that it had deemed the US economy to have exited a recession as of June 2009. I thought it might be useful to get a more nuanced reading of conditions on the ground from readers. So please weigh in: do you see […]
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