Category Archives: Macroeconomic policy

Geithner on Europe: “Subprime is Contained” Redux?

Most of the major figures in the financial crisis have had an “insert foot in mouth and chew” moment, although none have yet proven as memorable as Irving Fisher’s “Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” less than a week before the Great Crash of 1929 commenced. Bernanke’s was his March […]

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Volcker Talks of Possible EU Breakup (Loose Lips Sink Ships Edition)

I would imagine that some EU policymakers are not happy right now. We’ve put up links in Links from various European media outlets yesterday and today which describe the unusual lengths (by modern geopolitical standards) that Obama took to push Eurozone leaders to agree on a bailout package last weekend. Obama reportedly depicted the financial […]

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Alford: EU Shock and Awe Violates Powell Doctrine

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. The EU, IMF and friends have rolled out the shock-and-awe bailout package for Greece and the Euro. This package […]

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Is the Eurozone Shock and Awe Enough? (Updated)

The EU announced a €750 billion salvage operation, funds to shore up economies in economic difficulty, with the program consisting of €440 billion of loans from eurozone nations, €60 billion from an EU emergency fund, and €250 billion from the IMF. There are several layers of complicating factors, however. The first is that the German […]

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EU to Defend the Euro

The only moderate reduction in market havoc on Friday has all eyes on the European officialdom. Will they mount a credible enough plan over the weekend to buy them a bit of breathing room so they can come up a better salvage operation for the euro experiment? The odds are against both steps in the […]

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Auerback: Yes, Virginia. There is a Difference Between Greece and the US

By Marshall Auerback, a fund manager and investment strategist who writes for New Deal 2.0. Many market analysts, commentators and economists claim to be having a hard time finding a metric in which the US is in better financial shape than Greece. Ken Rogoff, for example, recently warned that a Greek default would usher in […]

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Greece, Germany, and the Dangers of Beggar Thy Neighbor

Investors continued their flight from risky assets as the wobbling Greek rescue looked ready to morph into a broader sovereign debt crisis, compounded by fears that a China’s expansion, once seen as inevitable and enduring, is now looking at risk of fading as the officialdom tries to dampen inflation. But the focus on the Greece […]

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Auerback/Mosler: Greece CAN Go it Alone

By Marshall Auerback, a fund manager and investment strategist and Warren Mosler, a fund manager and co-founder and Distinguished Research Associate of The Center for Full Employment And Price Stability at the University of Missouri in Kansas City. Greece can successfully issue and place new debt at low interest rates. The trick is to insert […]

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Guest Post: “Beyond Repair”

Reader Hubert sent along this post, with permission, and the following note: My friend Erwin has published a book out of ten years of columns for the German paper “Die Welt”. He put an Intro in front of it where he lays out why Germany will go down the tubes as everybody else. It is […]

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The inevitability of Greek default

A version of this post appeared yesterday at Credit Writedowns. I am running a poll on whether Greece will default. Please click here to vote. And feel free to comment on why you voted as you did. German Chancellor Angela Merkel is feeling pressure to force German banks to take a haircut on Greek debt […]

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Greece Downgrade: What Shoes Will Drop Next?

The Financial Times indicator is looking more and more reliable: when the pink paper starts playing at the top of its form, the wheels are about to come off. The most troubling aspect of the Standard & Poors downgrade of Greece to junk and Portugal’s downgrade came in its release. It isn’t just that Greece […]

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Guest Post: Will Policy Exits Just Be Revolving Doors?

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. Both fiscal and monetary policymakers have said that they will begin to unwind the stimulative policy stances when the […]

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