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. Low rates have a more powerful effect on driving financial assets than on driving the economy. -Jeremy Grantham, GM0 […]
Read more...By Rob Parenteau, CFA, sole proprietor of MacroStrategy Edge, editor of The Richebacher Letter, and a research associate of The Levy Economics Institute Reader note: please see yesterday’s post for a discussion of the fiscal balances map. As evident from the financial balances map, there are a whole range of possible combinations of current account […]
Read more...By Rob Parenteau, CFA, sole proprietor of MacroStrategy Edge, editor of The Richebacher Letter, and a research associate of The Levy Economics Institute The question of fiscal sustainability looms large at the moment – not just in the peripheral nations of the eurozone, but also in the UK, the US, and Japan. More restrictive fiscal […]
Read more...The Wall Street Journal is not the first to comment on the magnitude of the wagers against the euro (the Financial Times took note nearly two weeks ago: “Speculators raise record bets against euro“). But the Journal offers a spectacle sure to inflame sentiment in Europe: that of major hedge funds feasting first on lemon-roasted […]
Read more...By Marshall Auerback, a fund manager and investment strategist who writes for New Deal 2.0. Usually, we dread the regular Congressional testimonies of the Fed Chairman. They generally constitute a mix of obfuscation on the part of Mr. Bernanke mixed with political grandstanding on the part of Congress. But occasionally, a glimmer of truth comes […]
Read more...Martin Wolf, the Financial Times’ highly respected chief economics commentor, weighs in with a pretty pessimistic piece tonight. This makes for a companion to Peter Boone and Simon Johnson’s Doomsday cycle post from yesterday. Let us cut to the chase of Wolf’s argument: Now, after the implosion, we witness the extraordinary rescue efforts. So what […]
Read more...From “Financial Economics, Deregulation and OTC Derivatives: Interview with Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism,” The Institutional Risk Analyst, February 22, 2010 “Wall Street once ran from a graveyard to a river. It now runs from an ocean to an ocean, and beyond. It has become, in Dr. Charles A. Beard’s measured words, a new Appian […]
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. It is award season and I would like to nominate the 13-author “Preventing Deflation: Lessons from Japan’s Experience of […]
Read more...Folks, the time has come when I must start shamelessly promoting my book, Econned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism, which is being released March 2, 2010. I thought the extract below would give readers an idea of what the book is about, with one caveat. Econned goes into some detail about […]
Read more...A fair number of policy commentators are hewing to the view that somehow the EU will cobble together some sort of solution to the Greek fiscal mess because the alternatives look vasty worse. As Paul Krugman noted: Now what? A breakup of the euro is very nearly unthinkable, as a sheer matter of practicality. As […]
Read more...Reader Swedish Lex points out an important implication of a recent VoxEU post on the Nordic economic model and how it fared in the crisis: The Nordic countries – Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden – are champions of free trade and open markets… The Nordics have all had different monetary regimes since the euro. […]
Read more...By L. Randall Wray, a Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City who also writes for New Deal 2.0 Whenever a demagogue wants to whip up hysteria about federal budget deficits, he or she invariably begins with an analogy to a household’s budget: “No household can continually spend more than its income, and […]
Read more...Let’s acknowledge the obvious: there are a lot of not trivial impediments to reining in the banking industry: the deregulation policies that put a comparatively small number of firms in charge of infrastructure critical to commerce; the fact that said firms have done a very good job at disguising the rents they collect; that those […]
Read more...After the months of buoyant markets, a return to crisis-type headlines seems troublingly familiar, even though the perturbations of the last day or so are a pale shadow of the worst months of the crisis. And some are making the bull case. For instance, a headline at Clusterstock trumpetss, “Yesterday’s Bloodshed Sent The VIX Soaring […]
Read more...Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, gets it. Why does he have so little company on this side of the pond? King discussed what it would take to fix the financial services industry, and it’s more ambitious than anything you see under consideration in the US. Per the Independent: The Governor said […]
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