The US stock markets are harboring the fond notion that the sovereign-bank debt pile-up in Europe has no real implications across the pond, no doubt out of professional participants’ hope to retain solid gains thorugh year-end bonus setting. The debt markets are saying otherwise. Credit market risk aversion typically precedes a stock market correction, but […]
Read more...By Marshall Auerback, a hedge fund manager and portfolio strategist who writes for New Deal 2.0. Despite a blame-a-thon on Ireleand, Germans banks are really at the core of the eurozone catastrophe. Much ink has been spilled in the press over the Irish problem and the laxity of the country’s southern Mediterranean counterparts in contrast […]
Read more...By Richard Alford, a former economist at the New York Fed. Since then, he has worked in the financial industry as a trading floor economist and strategist on both the sell side and the buy side. The YouTube video “Quantitative Easing Explained” has surpassed 2.9 million views. The video is both entertaining and unremittingly critical […]
Read more...Yves here. While Quinn has a deliberately (some might say overly) provocative style and I quibble with some of his supporting arguments, his overarching observation, that America is wedded to an economic model past its sell by date, and that model has damaging social and political consequences, is one I believe will resonate with many […]
Read more...John Authers of the Financial Times provides an update on corporate cash-hoarding. In brief, it’s getting worse due to probably-warranted executive nervousness about business prospects. As Authers puts it: Corporate chieftains the world over have lots of cash, and want to hold on to it. It is a critical symptom of a new Age of […]
Read more...A story in Reuters signals that China is willing to soften its stance on rare earths. But of course, it has no reason to offer such a concession for free. The article indicates that China wants its trade partners to back off on their pressure on China to curb its abuses of international trade rules. […]
Read more...This story illustrates how far some companies are willing to go to preserve their bottom lines and assert their right to operate in an unfettered manner, even when that includes breaking the law and violating contracts. Huffington Post, via its daily political newsletter Huffington Post Hill, does some additional reporting on the very peculiar case […]
Read more...No formal announcement yet, but some presumably well-sourced rumours about the size of the Irish bailout (EUR 85Bn), and the rate (7%, via the redoubtable Twitterer on all matters Irish @LorcanRK). While we await the budget statement, there are reasons to suspect, or hope, that the bailout, like Godot, will never come, because it’s failing […]
Read more...From the folks at Versus. Enjoy!
Read more...Yves here. Normally I put up cross posts without additional commentary, but I wanted to offer a couple of observations about this post. While this piece is admittedly a bit heavy on economist-speak, and readers may differ with the policy recommendations, = it gives an even-handed account of the early rebound during the Great Depression […]
Read more...The media has been so preoccupied with acute symptoms of the debt crisis – sliding home prices, foreclosure abuses, ongoing Euromarket bank/sovereign debt stress, ongoing battles over financial regulation implementation, unhappiness over the Fed’s QE2 – that lingering problems are not getting the attention they deserve. High on the list is the how the weak […]
Read more...Following up on my last, John Dizard takes a different line from Ambrose. What Dizard wants is a sovereign default system, and he wants it now, not in 2013. The starting point is last week’s Eurobungle: Last week’s crisis in “peripheral” euro area bond markets was the consequence of a series of own goals by […]
Read more...Various Eurosceptics are piping up this morning, and no wonder. Unfortunately some of the interesting stuff is behind the FT’s magnificently unstable subscription firewall, which, in an attack of paranoia, or megalomania, has decided today, as it occasionally does, to deny access to everything, even the free bits, subscriber or not. It is like something […]
Read more...As far too diffidently implied in this post on Friday, looking out for an Irish bailout over the weekend turned out to be a mug’s game. There was a splendid swirl of authoritative reports about bailout talks and rebuttals by various Irish spokesmen, sampled here. But here we are: no bailout, with the Irish government […]
Read more...As an article in today’s New York Times makes clear, Robert Shiller has joined a group of behavioral economists that is advocating the use of propaganda and the sublter forms of manipulation of the public that Walter Lippmann famously called “the manufacture of consent.” In one sense, this ugly development is coming full circle. Lippmann […]
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