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 […]
Read more...Keiser is admittedly hyperbolic, but his colorful style has been effective in calling attention to some of the bad practices of financial institutions. This taping was on the day when I seemed to be the Typhoid Mary of studio operations. The audio kept failing (although the folks in NYC told me that happened often with […]
Read more...By Steve Keen, Associate Professor of Economics & Finance at the University of Western Sydney, and author of the book Debunking Economics, cross posted from Steve Keen’s Debt Deflation. The latest Flow of Funds release by the US Federal Reserve shows that the private sector is continuing to delever. However there are nuances in this […]
Read more...This blog tends to steer away from short-term market commentary because, as the wags say, “If you must forecast, forecast often,” and keeping tabs on the whims of Mr. Market can easily become an exercise in futility. Getting a sense of conditions on the ground and likely business/economic trajectories is a fraught activity even in […]
Read more...Normally, I don’t reproduce or excerpt from John Mauldin’s popular e-newsletters, but today he features a writer I particularly like, uber bear Albert Edwards of Societe Generale. To repurpose an old saw about pessimists, bears are bulls who have all the facts. Some of Edwards’ arguments, while well documented, aren’t new: employment stinks, the forward-looking […]
Read more...By Andrew Horowitz who writes at The Disciplined Investor It is Monday and we know that means either Merger Monday, Mutual Fund Monday or even Magical Monday . Well, it was surely a big volume morning as most traders are back to their desks. As China released their production numbers along with CPI, Asian markets […]
Read more...Wolfgang Munchau in the Financial Times gives a good recap as to why the recent spell of good cheer regarding the Eurozone is overdone. His central observation is that the Eurozone, like the US, patched things up with duct tape and bailing wire, and the hope was that the resumption of peppy growth would reduce […]
Read more...The end of the US summer holiday period is upon us, and with it, a return to reality. The markets are again concerned re Eurobanks, as the fears registered in EU periphery country bond spreads are now registering with investors in other markets. Per Bloomberg: The gaps between 10- year German bond yields and those […]
Read more...Wow, the EU is increasingly taking steps to force foreign, meaning US and UK firms, to play by its rules or not have access to its investors. The first salvo occurred over private equity funds and hedge funds, where the EU will limit its investors to funds located in the EU, and is also limiting […]
Read more...During the global financial crisis, after each acute phase, there would be a period of relief in which conditions returned to a semblance of normalcy, and policymakers and investors carried on as if acting as if all was well would make it so. Unfortunately, positive thinking provided only temporary relief from the undertow of rising […]
Read more...This post first appeared on March 24, 2008 The comments in the Financial Times by Yoshimi Watanabe, Japan’s financial services minister, are extraordinary. He ventured to give the US advice on its credit crunch based on Japan’s experience during its post-bubble-years banking crisis. And it’s not pretty. Why are these remarks so unusual? Consider: Most […]
Read more...As much as this blog was a persistent critic of the US version of the stress tests, I must hand it to the folks at the Treasury: they did an impressive job of dressing up and selling a garbage barge. The combination of consistent cheerleading, extend and pretend, and a few short squeezes did wonders […]
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