Before you break out the champagne on the news that international investors like the US (or more accurately, hate its stocks less than those of other nations), the article does not address the weighting of equities relative to other asset classes (ie, total allocations could still be down due to shifting more capital to commodities, […]
Read more...Ambrose Evans-Pritchard appears to be trying to corner the market in apocalyptic financial news. But his sources aren’t evangelicals, survivalists, or even goldbugs. The experts he cites are with respected financial firms, meaning they don’t sound alarms casually. Even more significant, the terms they are using to describe what might be coming are uncharacteristically dire. […]
Read more...Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in “Monetarists warn of crunch across Atlantic economies” in the Telegraph points to a troubling development: a fall over last few months in M1 and M2 in the US, UK and EU. Many have criticized the Fed for “printing money” of late. But the evidence suggests otherwise. First, all of the cash injections […]
Read more...Blomberg columnist William Pesek plays out a line of thought that may have occurred to some readers: what if the resolution of the credit crisis and global imbalances isn’t a nasty recession or punishing inflation but Japan-like protracted low growth, with stagnant to deteriorating living standards? This idea may not be as much of a […]
Read more...Readers have taken to throwing brickbats when I post material that suggests that raising interest rates (at least in advanced economies) might not be a good move right now. We’ve said before that the reason the Fed kept rates too low too long was it looked at inflation as strictly a domestic phenomenon and ignored […]
Read more...The newly-released annual report of the Bank of International Settlements sounds as if it is unusually lively reading. Most official documents strive for an anodyne tone, while this one appears to be unusually blunt. However, while some reporters have their hands on it, the report is not yet up on the BIS website, so those […]
Read more...Some optimists on the agriculture front, such as Nobel prize winning economist Gary Becker, have argued that increasing the productivity of farming would solve the problem of skyrocketing grain and food commodity prices. Only roughly 30% of crop-raising is done according to advanced techniques; if much of the rest of the land under cultivation was […]
Read more...An oil economics specialist, Mamdouh Salameh, who advises the World Bank and the UN Industrial Development Organisation, contends that oil prices would be at less than 1/3 of their current level had the US not invaded iraq. We’ve noted before that Iraqi reserves somehow gets overlooked, which is odd. Iraq’s production has fallen further than […]
Read more...PhysOrg reports that Russian president Dmitry Medvedev said that pollution could make certain parts of the country uninhabitable, possibly as soon as a decade from now. As much as China’s horrific pollution gets occasional attention in the West, Russia’s environmental woes win less scrutiny. Yet a seven-year study published in 2006 found that three of […]
Read more...Full disclosure: I’m normally a fan of Mohamed El-Erian, former head of Harvard Management, now co-president of bond giant Pimco. But his current comment in the Financial Times, “How best to manage global imbalances,” struck me as more than a tad disingenuous. Let’s go through the article: Whatever happened to the debate on global payments […]
Read more...Faithful readers, I hope you don’t mind if I am less chatty than usual today, since I had some competing obligations, plus some of the material on offer stands on its own. In the “pets.com redux” category, a reader pointed out this Wall Street Journal story: Excitement over oil is surging in Brazil…. After creating […]
Read more...The Financial Times’ John Authers, who called a market turn in bonds in early June of last year, sees another major shift in sentiment on the outlook for inflation and the dollar: For months, through all the volatility of the credit crisis, one bet has been enough to make profits. It is very simple: bet […]
Read more...Forgive me if you’ve heard this one before, but a classic Wall Street joke illustrates an important concept. On a slow day in the markets, trader A decided to open bidding on a can of sardines. He offered it at $1. It was snapped up by B at $2, who sold it to C at […]
Read more...Without a doubt, the Federal Reserve now faces the most difficult financial and economic climate in our collective memory. And it is increasingly apparent that its options are constrained. Although it is premature to arrive at definitive judgments, it’s nevertheless worth asking whether some of these limitations were unwittingly self-created. Friday’s market rout, triggered by […]
Read more...The International Energy Agency has determined that for greenhouse gas emissions to be reduced to the level recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (and some contend that report was too conservative), carbon prices would need to be $200 a ton, more than four time the price now in effect for the EU carbon […]
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