Money and Banking – Part 2
How the Fed balance sheet works and why what we, the public, consider to be money is a debt of the Federal Reserve.
Read more...Category Archives: Credit markets
Bond Investors Get Skittish as Record Wave of Acquisitions Push to Close Financings
Standard & Poors warns of the worst drop in the “net outlook bias” for bond investors since the financial crisis.
Read more...Why Larry Summers is Wrong and Bernie Sanders is Right on Glass Steagall
Larry Summers, acting as a proxy for Team Clinton, attacked Sanders’ reform proposals, particularly the an updated Glass Steagall. Her’s why Summers is wrong.
Read more...2016: Oil Limits and the End of the Debt Supercycle
How tight linkages among phenomena, such as oil and commodity prices, and flagging non-elite wages, are about to cause substantial economic disruption.
Read more...China’s Contradictory Aims, Greater International Role Versus Domestic Economic Control, HIt Breaking Point
China appears to be in denial that it can’t have more open financial markets and maintain the same degree of control over the economy that it once enjoyed.
Read more...Deflation Denialism: No, Chancellor, 0.5% Inflation is Not “Welcome News”
What is deflation? What has caused inflation to fall? And why is there no such thing as ‘good deflation’?
Read more...Puerto Rico Defaults a Second Time; Claims of “Scheming” Designed to Crush Island Citizens
Puerto Rico fails to pay $37.3 million in bonds due today. While investors and analysts call it a bluff, the stakes are quite real.
Read more...Ilargi: 2016 Is An Easy Year To Predict
Deflation will become an even more powerful and destructive force in 2016.
Read more...Randy Wray: Debt-Free Money and Banana Republics, Part II
More discussion of the problems with the “debt-free money” construct, to the extent that it can even be called a construct.
Read more...Michael Hudson: The IMF Changes its Rules to Isolate China and Russia
How the West is deploying the IMF to fight the nightmare scenario of US geopolitical strategists: foreign economic independence from the US.
Read more...The Fed’s New “Operation Twist”: Twisted Logic for Bank Profits at the Expense of the Real Economy
How did Janet Yellen and the Federal Reserve justify their rate increase now, despite strong signs that there is little economic basis for doing so?
Call this an exercise in twisted logic, plain and simple.
Read more...The Continuing Fight Over Fannie and Freddie, and the Real Problem of US Mortgages
How understanding the history of Fannie and Freddie, as well as how unnatural US mortgages are, helps explain why the fight over the future of the GSEs continues.
Read more...Debunking “The Big Short”: How Michael Lewis Turned the Real Villains of the Crisis into Heroes
How Michael Lewis’ The Big Short, whether for profit or by accident, has denied the public the truth about what really causes the crisis.
Read more...Even Bank Supporters Arguing for Restoration of Glass Steagall
John Dizard, who perhaps by virtue of being one of the Financial Times’ most original and insightful columnists, is relegated to its weekend “Wealth” section, has written a particularly important pair of articles. Note that Dizard’s ambit is not policy wonkery but apt and often cynical observations about behavior and trading patterns in less visible […]
Read more...German Financialization and the Eurozone Crisis
German financialization and input on the eurozone’s financial architecture promoted deficits, increased systemic risk, and facilitated the onset of Europe’s subsequent crises.
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