Comstock Partners has a new newsletter out, and it makes a cogent case that there is no pretty way out of our over-leveraged mess. The disheartening bit is not only the narrative but a series of charts. One, on debt to GDP, show that it has risen in the last year (debt was roughly $49 […]
Read more...Submitted by Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns. This post is from Niels Jensen of Absolute Return Partners. I have featured his monthly newsletter a number of times on Credit Writedowns (here’s the link to the last one, hilarious title). Jensen is very good. Visit www.arpllp.com to learn more about Absolute Return Partners and to sign […]
Read more...Japan once had robust exports and a de facto two-tier economy. Yet the image of the dreadful domestic economy dominated as Japan has been characterized as having a lost nearly two decades. I’ve long harbored the suspicion that Japan played up the stagnant domestic economy so no one would bust its chops over its booming […]
Read more...One of the alleged reasons for cheer on the economic front is that major foreign economies are bottoming. For instance, Japan reported the biggest increase in industrial production in 56 years roughly two weeks ago, A comment from a Bloomberg story on that release: This is not so much a green shoot as it is […]
Read more...The Japanese have a wonderful expression that I will take some liberty in translating. They use it to signify when someone is trying to claim great distinctions among low levels of activity or achievement. The phrase is roughly “A height competition among peanuts.” Reader DoctoRx flagged this Bloomberg report as a Pangloss item. What is […]
Read more...The Fed has a mess on its hands. Yields on ten and thirty year Treasuries have shot up in the last few days as investors have become fixated on burgeoning Treasury supply in coming months and years. and, as belief in the “green shoots” story is rising, a shift to riskier assets. In addition, while […]
Read more...The only bit of cheer coming out of Japan’s dreadful economic report is that the first quarter decline in GDP of 15.2% annualized, the worst every recorded, was slightly less awful than expected. The forecasters surveyed by Bloomberg expected a fall of 16.1%. However, the fourth quarter contraction was revised upwards from 13.2% to 14.1%. […]
Read more...Submitted by Edward Harrison of the site Credit Writedowns On Monday, I mentioned that the Asian Development Bank Fund was a clear sign that Asia was cutting loose from the west and looking to take care of things domestically. WIlliam Pesek of Bloomberg News put out a piece this morning echoing those sentiments, but also […]
Read more...The George Santayana saying, “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” is so oft repeated as to verge on cliche. Yet the US variant of this syndrome is to be aware of history, then rationalize how it does not apply to us. Japanese policy makers from the early days of the […]
Read more...Note the dramatic fall in Japanese exports in February was relative to the year-ago level, but that does not make the outcome any less ugly. From Bloomberg: Overseas shipments fell 49.4 percent from a year earlier, the sharpest decline since at least 1980, when the government started to keep comparable data, the Finance Ministry said […]
Read more...When trade started falling off in the later half of last year, this blog commented from time to time that the scarcity of trade finance, particularly letters of credit, was playing a meaningful role. That line of thinking was sometimes met with skepticism. Trade related funding has gotten even more scarce and costly, to the […]
Read more...Japan has been hit by a double-whammy: the global fall in trade, made worse by its (formerly) rising yen. While deteriorating conditions in China generally get more media attention, the falloff in Japan is stunning and serious. Japan has spent more than a decade stagnant, but the overall growth figures mask the fact that the […]
Read more...In case you managed to miss it, Japan has taken a huge fall in its relative economic standing by more or less standing still for almost a generation. The comparative fall is 30%. And even though visitors to Japan do not see the superficial signs of distress (infrastructure is well maintained, people are neatly dressed, […]
Read more...Ah, today the Financial Times reminds me of the way it was back in early 2007, when it was clearly heads and shoulders above any US paper. Wonder why I have fewer days like that, It isn’t improved reporting by the US media (although they are further down the curve). I suspect that the FT […]
Read more...Japan has long had a two-tier economy: a robust export sector and a comatose domestic economy. With the yen at a high level and trade volumes generally falling, the export sector has gone spectacularly into reverse gear, taking overall growth with it. From Bloomberg: Japan’s economy shrank at an annual 12.7 percent pace last quarter, […]
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