Category Archives: Economic fundamentals

Rob Parenteau: Revisiting the PIIGS Led to Slaughter Perspective – Implications of a Greek Default

By Rob Parenteau, CFA, sole proprietor of MacroStrategy Edge, editor of The Richebacher Letter, and a research associate of The Levy Economics Institute

Last year we provided an analysis (on the Naked Capitalism blog and elsewhere, including the Levy Economics Institute Annual Minsky Conference, and CBC interviews), based on the financial balances approach that suggested a number of problems could arise with the eurozone’s pursuit of what are called “expansionary fiscal consolidations”. Without a large and sustained swing into a current account surplus, the financial balance approach revealed that the pursuit of fiscal consolidation would undermine the ability of the private sector to service the debt loads it had built up during the prior decade of currency union. Simply put, higher taxes and lower government spending drain cash flow from households and firms, and that increases the financial fragility of economies.

Few options left to save the euro zone

Cross-posted from Credit Writedowns How should I begin this post? Let me start out with my former default position: I have always seen a sovereign default and restructuring within the euro zone as more likely than a break-up of the euro zone. I would say I considered the dissolution of the euro zone as an […]

“Welcome to Phase 2 of the Eurozone Crisis”

By Richard Baldwin, Professor of International Economics, Graduate Institute, Geneva. Cross posted from VoxEU

The Eurozone crisis moved into phase 2 this August when the contagion spread to Italian debt, Spanish debt, and most EZ banks. Radical ECB actions prevented a disaster. This column argues that the ECB emergency policies are unsustainable politically and perhaps legally. The only policy combination that EZ leaders could agree on quickly enough involves political cover for ECB bond buying in exchange for national fiscal reforms of the German “debt brake” type.

Quelle Surprise! Partitioning Bank Retail and Wholesale Operations Won’t Cost Much

One of the most annoying aspects of Life After the Crisis is the utter refusal of banks to take responsibility for the costs they have imposed on the rest of us. This is directly related to their efforts to fight any and all interference with their God-given right to loot.

Summer Rerun: Bankruptcy Cramdown Defeated: Banksters Again Prevail Over Real Economy

This post first appeared on April 30, 2009

In another disheartening development on the banking front, the Senate defeated legislation giving judges the authority to modify residential mortgages in bankruptcy.

Note that the popular description is often misconstrued in short form descriptions. Judges would not have had open-ended authority to make changes. The construct is that mortgages are collateralized loans. The mortgage balance is written down in bankruptcy to the value of the collateral, and the excess is added to the unsecured creditor claims.

Philip Pilkington: The Irish Establishment – Mad as Goats?

By Philip Pilkington, a journalist and writer living in Dublin, Ireland

Learn to say the same thing
What defeats people is a double confession
One time they will confess one thing
And the next they will confess something else
Talk to them, they will say:
Learn to say the same thing
Let us hold fast to saying the same thing”
– Cat Power, ‘Say’

In Ireland we used to measure our economic performance based on GDP (GNP actually, but we won’t go into that). Pretty standard fare for any advanced economy, really. Not so anymore. These days we measure our economic performance based on the government’s ability to extract tax revenue out of the general populace to pay for extortionate loans to our EU masters.

How is Your (Holiday) Economy Doing?

I’m a bit surprised that anyone can be surprised by the lousy jobs numbers for August. Consumers are worried and too many economists have been trying to draw trend lines through noise in retail spending data and call it proof that a recovery in under way. Broad measures of unemployment are stuck in the upper teens, big companies are continuing to shed jobs, small businesses on the whole are pessimistic, state budgets are under pressure and federal deficit spending is set to be reined in. With housing in most markets not having bottomed, the overwhelming majority of consumers having taking a wealth hit, businesses not investing and government not taking up the slack, where exactly is growth supposed to come from? The tooth fairy?

Chinese manufacturing takes a hit from abroad

The just released official manufacturing purchasing mangers index (PMI) for China shows a small rebound in August. The headline PMI rose from 50.7 in July to 50.9 in August, just slightly below market expectation of 51.1.

Philip Pilkington: Dynamism and Instability – The Search for Profits and Disequilibrium

By Philip Pilkington, a journalist and writer living in Dublin, Ireland

The completeness of the Ricardian victory is something of a curiosity and a mystery. It must have been due to a complex of suitabilities in the doctrine to the environment into which it was projected. That it reached conclusions quite different from what the ordinary uninstructed person would expect, added, I suppose, to its intellectual prestige. That its teaching, translated into practice, was austere and often unpalatable, lent it virtue. That it was adapted to carry a vast and consistent logical superstructure, gave it beauty. That it could explain much social injustice and apparent cruelty as an inevitable incident in the scheme of progress, and the attempt to change such things as likely on the whole to do more harm than good, commended it to authority. That it afforded a measure of justification to the free activities of the individual capitalist, attracted to it the support of the dominant social force behind authority.
– John Maynard Keynes

In our previous piece on profits we showed how profits ultimately come from investment. There we saw that whether this investment was from the government sector or from the private sector mattered little (once again we leave out the external sector for the sake of simplicity). Either way it was the key factor determining profits.

We also saw that this entire system was rather fragile and prone to breakdown.

ECRI: “It’s Too Late” for Obama on Jobs

Cross-posted from Credit Writedowns Economic Cycle Research Institute co-founder Lakshman Achuthan was on Tech Ticker yesterday discussing the outlook for the economy. Business Insider does a good write-up of his commentary, highlighting the fact that the ECRI has yet to signal a double dip. However, I wanted to add a few comments as well. ECRI’s […]

Auerback/Parenteau: Jackson Hole will be a Black Hole for Those Hoping for QE3

By Marshall Auerback, a portfolio strategist, hedge fund manager, and Roosevelt Institute Fellow, and Rob Parenteau, CFA, sole proprietor of MacroStrategy Edge, editor of The Richebacher Letter, and a research associate of The Levy Economics Institute. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives

Those leading the charge for “fiscal consolidation” now seem positively shocked by the violent gyrations in the stock market, as expectations rapidly seem to be shifting toward an “L” shaped recovery or worse – a possible global recession. To those of us on this blog who have consistently downplayed the prospects of global recovery in the midst of widespread private sector AND public sector retrenchment, none of this sadly comes as a surprise. We are, as Bill Mitchell noted recently, experiencing a “self-inflicted catastrophe”, largely because of dangerously destructive myths in regard to the efficacy (or lack of it) in regard to fiscal policy. But in spite of the shrill rhetoric of the fiscal austerian brigades, the markets are beginning to intuit that a nation cannot have a fiscal contraction expansion when all other spending is flat or going backwards and yet that remains the general trajectory of policy.

Satyajit Das on the Botox Economy

As much as I like Satyajit Das’ books (his new offering, Extreme Money, is just out and was reviewed favorably in the Financial Times), I wish he’d get on TV more often. His being in Sydney puts him at a bit of a disadvantage.

This clip is amusing.

Chinese Banks: “These Things Aren’t Banks”

This is a terrific discussion of Chinese banking by two experts who do not mince words, Carl Walter of JP Morgan and Victor Shih of Northwestern University. Both have a great sense of history and go to some length to portray how economic and monetary arrangements for these “banks” differ from what most of us would assume. The discussion includes periodic crises and the creative means used to rescue banks, the unusually high level of financial assets for an emerging economy, the sustainability of growth, and the role of banks in the political system.