By Marshall Auerback, a portfolio strategist who writes for New Deal 2.0 Something is very wrong with Japan. The Japanese economy has been much weaker than any other major economy for a while now: over the last business expansion, through the Great Recession, and in the recovery since the Great Recession trough. Japan’s business cycle […]
Read more...The specter of demonstrations in Europe are not only likely to become a regular news item, but other economies have high odds of similar social stresses, a UN agency forecasts. The International Labour Organisation has pushed back its estimate of when global employment will return to pre-crisis levels back to 2015. Given the widespread signs […]
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...Once a Cassandra, always a Cassandra? That seems to be William White’s fate. White, the former chief economist of the Bank of International Settlements, is best known for his warnings in 2003 that many advanced economies were in the grip of housing bubbles, which Greenspan pointedly ignored. Although he is now celebrated for that call, […]
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...This is a great interview of Tom Ferguson on Real News Network on the consequences of the “head’s I win, tails you lose” the financial sector has constructed with the rest of us, with Baltimore as object lesson. Enjy!
Read more...I participated in the White House Blogger conference call today, as a stand-in for the traveling Yves. The call was run by Jason Furman, the deputy director of the National Economic Council, who provided a brief recap of President Obama’s speech earlier in the day. The stated purpose of the call was to emphasize the […]
Read more...Via Bloomberg: View the segment here.
Read more...By Scott Fullwiler, Associate Professor of Economics at Wartburg College At its core, there are two parts to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). The first is a description of how the monetary system actually works, mostly focusing upon interactions between the central bank, the treasury, and the financial system, though this part also requires a very […]
Read more...Wolfgang Munchau has an intriguing piece at the Financial Times debunking the idea the Germany’s recent peppy growth numbers are as salutary as Mr. Market seems to believe. Part of his message isn’t necessarily all that surprising, and comes towards the end of the article: ….it is important to keep some perspective and not draw […]
Read more...Normally, I don’t report on anecdotes from my immediate circle, but a set of conversations in less than a 24 hour period suggests that even those comparatively unaffected by the crisis are bracing themselves for the possibility of sudden, large-scale, adverse changes. And that sort of gnawing worry seems to be growing in New York […]
Read more...This is a particularly clear and succinct explanation of the role of Treasury auctions in monetary operations at Pragmatic Capitalism (hat tip BondSquawk), in a post I urge you to read in its entirety, “The Myth of the Great Bond “Bubble.” The government bond market is merely a monetary tool that the central bank utilizes […]
Read more...By Marshall Auerback, a portfolio strategist and fund manager who writes at New Deal 2.0 Hint: it’s not Republicans. Social Security remains one of the greatest achievements of the Democratic Party since its creation 75 years ago. Although Republicans have historically fulminated against the program (Ronald Reagan once likened it as something akin to “socialism”), […]
Read more...By Richard Alford, a former economist at the New York Fed. Since then, he has worked in the financial industry as a trading floor economist and strategist on both the sell side and the buy side. As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they […]
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