Category Archives: Economic fundamentals

“Why Syriza Will Blink”

Anatole Kaletsky has a cognent, forcefully argued new article at the Project Syndicate website, Why Syriza Will Blink, which independently comes to the conclusion we’ve reached, that the winning strategy for the creditors is to keep Greece in the sweatbox and use worsening economic and social conditions in Greece to crush domestic support for Syriza. Kaletsky goes further than we have, arguing that this is the course the Troika is taking, and the new coalition should have anticipated this as a likely strategy, since it’s the same one they used successfully against Cyprus two years ago.

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Wolf Richter: How Soaring Housing Costs Impoverish a Whole Generation and Maul the Real Economy

Housing costs are beyond the reach of many middle class earners. And while that is no news, housing has been the engine of past recoveries. So inflated home prices are part of why the economy will stay mired in low growth.

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The Foreclosure Crisis Caused a Great Migration in Miniature

Several commentators picked up on the relationship between the events in Baltimore and the dearth of economic opportunity that leads to a sense of hopelessness. But precious few added the component of the foreclosure crisis, a dislocating event that has few parallels in American history. A new paper in the American Sociological Review by Matthew Hall (Cornell), Kyle Crowder (University of Washington) and Amy Spring (Georgia State) puts numbers to this, and shows that we really had a small-scale version of the Great Migration, the shift of African-Americans from the rural south to the big cities of the north. This migration hollowed out and segregated African-American and Latino communities to an even greater degree than where they already were.

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Wolf Richter: “Smart Money” Prepares to Profit from Bond Market Rout

“If I had an easy way and a non-risk way of shorting a whole lot of 20- or 30-year bonds, I’d do it,” said our favorite uncle Warren Buffett on CNBC. These kinds of bonds have been on a terrific bull run ever since Paul Volker, as Chairman of the Fed, cracked down on inflation. But now, even the avuncular face of capitalism would bet against them.

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The Persecution and Assassination of the People of Greece as Performed by the Inmates of the Troika, Under the Direction of the Eurogroup

A new paper shreds the myths that justified the misguided application of austerity and wage-rate reduction policies in Greece and the Eurozone.

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