Category Archives: Currencies

Japan: All Talk, No Action on Levitating Yen

The yen reached a 15 year high overnight as the Japanese Finance minister’s efforts to talk the currency down appear to have backfired. From MarketWatch: Strong words against a strong yen from Japanese Finance Minister Yoshihiko Noda failed to prevent the Japanese unit from rising to fresh multiyear highs…. Noda said that recent currency moves […]

The Perils of Changes of Global Leadership

John Plender in his comment at the Financial Times, “Great dangers attend the rise and fall of great powers,” does a fine job given the space constraints of discussing the fraught process of changes in global economic and political leadership. I thought it would be useful to quote Plender at length, with some additional observations, […]

Auerback: News Flash– China Reduces US Treasury Holdings, World Does Not Come To an End

By Marshall Auerback, a portfolio strategist and fund manager who writes at New Deal 2.0 In a post titled “China Cuts US Treasury Holdings By Record Amount,” Mike Norman makes the excellent observation that while China is moving its money out of Treasuries, interest rates are hitting record lows. In other words, the sky still […]

Satyajit Das: Grecian Derivative

By Satyajit Das, a risk consultant and author of Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives – Revised Edition (2010, FT-Prentice Hall). In his “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, the English Romantic poet John Keats declared that “beauty is truth, truth beauty”. In derivatives, its seems transactions may be […]

Widening Chinese Trade Surplus Increases Pressure to Intervene

In the 1980s, when unemployment hit 8%, Ronald Reagan’s administration was concerned and took steps to address the problem. One of the causes had been the 60% increase in the dollar versus the yen, which allowed the Japanese to make deep inroads into the US. One of the responses was the so-called Plaza Accord, in […]

On Investor Distrust in the Markets

An article by Gillian Tett in the Financial Times, “Trading volumes retreat with investor trust,” contends that the notably low trading activity of late is a sign of deeper changes in financial markets: The most pernicious issue hanging over the system right now is a loss of confidence – not merely in the idea that the […]

Summer Rerun: “Carry trade threatens a deflationary global collapse”

This post appeared originally on July 27, 2007 Warning: this post is only for those with sound constitutions. Tim Lee, head of a financial economics consultancy, tells us in a Financial Times article what a carry trade unwind will look like (answer: very nasty) and what it would take to prevent it (the Japanese have […]

Andy Xie on China’s Empty Apartments

I recall a presentation on China at the Asia Society on the eve of the financial crisis, in which an economist commented on China’s extremely low interest rate on deposits (less than 1%) versus its markedly higher inflation rate, and commented that that was a recipe for hyperinflation. Well, that hasn’t been and is unlikely […]

More Incoherent Remarks From China on Its Dollar Holdings

Dean Baker has regularly made fun of the idea that the Chinese are concerned that they will show losses on their large dollar positions, mainly in invested mainly in US Treasuries. As serious traders will tell you, it’s actually easy to manipulate a market, but hard to make money doing it. As Baker put it: […]

Satyajit Das Examines Eurozone Stability Fund Three Card Monte

Satyajit Das is too shrewd to call the European Financial Stability Facility, informally described as a €440 billion sovereign bailout fund, a mere sleight of hand. But it’s hard not to draw that conclusion after reading his Financial Times comment today. Central banks and governments have developed an alarming fondness for the very sort of […]

Moody’s Cuts Portugal’s Sovereign Debt Rating Two Notches to A1

The reporting so far is thin, just notices of the announcement at Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal that Moody’s cut the rating on Portugal’s sovereign debt from Aa2 to A1. The Bloomberg headline notes that Moody’s put the outlook as stable, while the Journal pointed out that the agency expected “Portuguese government’s financial strength […]

Germany’s Eurobailout Template: A Stealth Takeover?

Der Spiegel (hat tip reader Richard Smith) presents a detailed sketch of German thinking, specifically that of chancellor Angela Merkel and finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble, regarding how countries who fail an initial round of restructuring within the eurozone would be treated. This piece is very much worth reading, but the German proposal has all the […]

Debunking Eurozone Optimism

I sometimes wonder whether Wolfgang Munchau of the Financial Times and Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the Telegraph channel each other. Although they are both dubious of the eurozone’s ability to navigate its way out of its current mess, they also have an interesting habit of taking up similar issues on the same publication date. Today, both […]

“The dollar question: Where are we?”

By Kati Suominen, Trans-Atlantic Fellow at the German Marshall Fund in Washington, cross posted from VoxEU The global crisis has led some to question the dollar’s place as the dominant currency. This column discusses three camps in the literature: those advocating a new synthetic global currency, those arguing that a new reserve currency will emerge, […]

Soros on the Crisis and the Euro

The New York Review of Books has an article by George Soros with his take on the challenges facing the Eurozone. It includes a good, high level recitation of the structural deficiencies in the Eurozone (in particular, its lack of a treasury), the evolution of recent stresses, and suggested remedies. While the initial discussion covers […]