It wasn’t all that long ago that the media and banking industry commentators would worry about the coming train wreck in commercial real estate. But peculiarly, that topic has more or less receded from view. It appears the public has only so much interest in banking stories, and the frenzied coverage of financial services non-reform […]
Read more...Complementing today’s piece on the Chinese property bubble, a cross-post from VoxEU, with some graphical depictions of how wild the bubble has become. The NYT article referenced in the piece is here – RS. By Yongheng Deng, Professor of Real Estate and Finance at the National University of Singapore, Joseph Gyourko, Professor of Real Estate, […]
Read more...This post first appeared on May 6, 2007 I’m certain you’re familiar with the expression “death wish.” I am beginning to wonder whether America has a banana republic wish. The country has been taking steps towards being a small-minded, elite-dominated, sham democracy. Mind you, I am pointing to a tendency, not an established fact. The […]
Read more...This post first appeared on February 18, 2007 Mirable dictu, a Wall Street Journal editorial, “How Expansions Die,” that, for the most part, has a solid foundation in reality. Although the WSJ’s news pages have been reporting on the meltdown in the subprime mortgage market (admittedly somewhat less intently than the Financial Times), both the […]
Read more...RealtyTrac, as reported on Housing Wire, gave a gloomy update on the US housing market. RealtyTrac does granular collection of data on foreclosures, capturing every filing. One of the shortcomings of this approach is that processes vary by state (as in some state require more court filings over the course of a foreclosure than others). […]
Read more...Satyajit Das is too shrewd to call the European Financial Stability Facility, informally described as a €440 billion sovereign bailout fund, a mere sleight of hand. But it’s hard not to draw that conclusion after reading his Financial Times comment today. Central banks and governments have developed an alarming fondness for the very sort of […]
Read more...Is the economics version of defining deviancy downward mean that the new normal of high unemployment and inadequate job growth is seen as acceptable by policymakers (at least those not up for re-election this November)? It’s one thing to recognize that we are working through a painful hangover after a private sector borrowing binge that […]
Read more...The New York Review of Books has an article by George Soros with his take on the challenges facing the Eurozone. It includes a good, high level recitation of the structural deficiencies in the Eurozone (in particular, its lack of a treasury), the evolution of recent stresses, and suggested remedies. While the initial discussion covers […]
Read more...Martin Wolf, the Financial Times’ esteemed economics editor, launches another salvo against misguided austerity measures today. It’s also noteworthy that he argues from a Modern Monetary Theory perspective. Wolf first stresses that yields on government bonds show that inflationsitas are all wet: I have a question: do we believe that markets are unable to price […]
Read more...Rob Parenteau and I have an op-ed at the New York Times today. Rob’s last post here argued energetically that the now-established trend of the corporate sector to save, as opposed to invest in growth, in advanced economies, and even most emerging economies, was tantamount to capitalists abandoning their traditional role. It reminded me of […]
Read more...The stress tests conducted on 19 large American banks by the US Treasury in 2009 were an amazingly effective exercise in salesmanship and sleight of hand. Banking industry experts, including Bill Black, Chris Whalen, and Josh Rosner, dismissed the process as mere theatrics: too little staffing and not enough “stress” in the economic forecasts and […]
Read more...By Marshall Auerback, a portfolio strategist and fund manager Wolfgang Munchnau is right. Only a closer union can save the euro. In the longer term, it will be necessary to put in place a permanent fiscal arrangement through which the central euro zone authorities distribute funds to be used by member nations. Ideally this should […]
Read more...We’ve warned for some time that the eurozone’s sure-to-fail muddle-through approach to its structural challenges was rattling investor confidence. Worse, its insistence on wearing an austerity hairshirt was not only committing Europe to deflation, but had high odds of sucking the global economy down along with it. Given how fragile the recovery is in advanced […]
Read more...While the headline focuses on her outlook for housing, Whitney is bearish across the board, seeing little reason to cheer on the employment and bank earnings fronts. She sees a 10% fall in housing prices in the next six months (!), which will hit bank earnings (Whitney has argued since at least early 2009 that […]
Read more...The bond markets are quicker-trigger to register concern about deteriorating fundamentals than the stock market, with risky credits the canaries in the coal mine. Bloomberg reports that spreads have widened in both leveraged loans and emerging market debt, but also notes some analysts see this rise as a blip rather than a trend. From Bloomberg: […]
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