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...I’ve missed Willem Buiter, who offered wonderfully trenchant commentary at his Financial-Times hosted blog, only to be forced into dreary moderation (at least in his public pronouncements, I suspect his has difficulty containing himself in private) by taking a job as Citigroup’s chief economist. Buiter has long been concerned about the vulnerability of the UK, […]
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...Goldman may have made a fatal mistake. Fatal not to the existence of the firm, but to its standing, reputation, legitimacy, and ultimately, to the thing it covets most, its profits. Power is most effective when it is used as sparingly as possible. Niall Ferguson, in book The Cash Nexus, stressed the importance of financing […]
Read more...The financial press has for the most part looked at the possibility of sovereign debt crises in Greece, Spain, and Portugal through a deal-making window: will Germany and other EU surplus countries back a rescue package, and if so, with what strings attached? There has certainly been ample speculation, particularly since a bailout of Greece […]
Read more...Kenneth Rogoff, former IMF chief economist warned that a series of sovereign debt defaults is likely to be in the offing. From Bloomberg: Following banking crises, “we usually see a bunch of sovereign defaults, say in a few years. I predict we will again,” Rogoff,…said at a forum in Tokyo today. He said financial markets […]
Read more...By Marshall Auerback, a fund manager and investment strategist and L. Randall Wray, a Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City In recent weeks there has been much discussion about what to do about Greece. These questions become all the more relevant as the country attempts to float a multibillion-euro bond issue later […]
Read more...From FAZ,. Note the text below, translated by EuroSavant, replaces an earlier GoogleTranslate version. You can read an English version of the entire article here. In the larger scheme of things, this example shows how AIG could have, and probably did, serve to channel funds from the public at large to speculators. London investment bankers […]
Read more...By Marshall Auerback, a fund manager and investment strategist who writes for New Deal 2.0 and Yves Smith Conventional wisdom holds that the Chinese are due (as in overdue) for a revaluation of their currency, the renminbi. For instance, a recent report from Goldman argues that China will raise the value of the RMB against […]
Read more...The short answer to the question in the headline is “When there are no rules.” A headline in a current Bloomberg story illustrates the problem: “Goldman Sachs, Greece Didn’t Disclose Swap, Investors ‘Fooled’.” “Fooled” is an unusual choice of words, particularly when applied to to presumed grown-ups like institutional investors and international overseers. Bloomberg seems […]
Read more...The latest move in the “so what are we gonna do about Greece?” EU vs. Greece drama was that Greece was playing non-negotiable, saying it had agreed to reduce its fiscal deficit by 4% of GDP (from over 12.7% to 8.7%) and it was premature to talk about doing more at this juncture. That posture […]
Read more...Several readers pointed to a recent post by Michael Pettis, which mainly discussed how expected wage increases in China are a hopeful sign that China is taking steps to become more consumption-oriented. But as much as this is a move forward, changing the mix of China’s composition of demand is at least a decade-long project […]
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...In a New York Times op-ed late last year, Bill Black, Frank Partnoy, and Eliot Spitzer called for an open source investigation: we know where the answers are. They are in the trove of e-mail messages still backed up on A.I.G. servers, as well as in the key internal accounting documents and financial models generated […]
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