This post first appeared on May 9, 2008 The question above may seem foolish. Oil has just passed $124 a barrel despite improvement in the dollar. Commodities prices are moving less in lockstep than before (gold and wheat in particular have backed off significantly from their highs) suggesting that buying is not the result of […]
Read more...Yves here. I did a small study for a then midlevel, now top level Russian oligarch in the early 1990s who bought a US retail chain. It wasn’t exactly the most astute purchase. One of the factoids I came across in assisting him in figuring out how to scrub it up for resale was the […]
Read more...By Marshall Auerback, a portfolio strategist who writes for New Deal 2.0 Something is very wrong with Japan. The Japanese economy has been much weaker than any other major economy for a while now: over the last business expansion, through the Great Recession, and in the recovery since the Great Recession trough. Japan’s business cycle […]
Read more...A story up on Bloomberg may be far more significant than its bland headline, “China to Spur Domestic Demand to Stabilize Economy, Wen Says,” suggests. In recent posts, we’ve inveighed about the dangers of the path China is now on. Its economy is unbalanced to an unprecedented degree. Exports plus investment account for a full […]
Read more...The specter of demonstrations in Europe are not only likely to become a regular news item, but other economies have high odds of similar social stresses, a UN agency forecasts. The International Labour Organisation has pushed back its estimate of when global employment will return to pre-crisis levels back to 2015. Given the widespread signs […]
Read more...Only been a few Congressmen have weighed in on the mortgage documentation mess so far, since wrapping up the current Congressional session and campaigning consumes a lot of bandwidth. Nevertheless, I am getting reports from DC that people on the Hill are starting to take the issue of foreclosure document fabrication, errors, and improprieties seriously. […]
Read more...A measure passed by the House tonight, which would permit the US to impose tariffs on countries that keep their currencies artificially low, is at this juncture a mere statement of intent. It is nevertheless playing into a dynamic of the hardening of stances between the US and China. Note that the bill has yet […]
Read more...A brief recap of a couple of useful sighting on the “rising anxieties in Europe” front. Edward Hugh has a very thorough update (bond spread trends, underlying drivers, an astute discussion of politics) leavened by a great deal of wry humor (“So, like former US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson before them, Europe’s leaders, having armed […]
Read more...The spin-meisters continue to package things that ought to incite outrage in anodyne wrappers in the hope no one will look inside. “The new normal” and “structural unemployment” join the universe inhabited by such gems as “extraordinary rendition” and “pre-emptive strike”. “New normal” is particularly insidious, since it implies that we must accept current conditions, […]
Read more...Today, quite a few commentators fell in with the take of the writeup by Real Time Economics on a speech by Paul Volcker given a conference on macroprudential regulation hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Its lead-in: Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker scrapped a prepared speech he had planned to deliver at […]
Read more...In our escalating currency (really trade) dispute with China, many people argue that China holds the whip hand because it would quit buying US bonds. As we’ve explained repeatedly, that’s the last thing China would do, since stopping buying US debt (or more accurately, US dollars which it then moves into higher yielding assets than […]
Read more...A lot of commentators, including your truly, took issue with the NBER announcement that it had deemed the US economy to have exited a recession as of June 2009. I thought it might be useful to get a more nuanced reading of conditions on the ground from readers. So please weigh in: do you see […]
Read more...By Steve Keen, Associate Professor of Economics & Finance at the University of Western Sydney, and author of the book Debunking Economics, cross posted from Steve Keen’s Debt Deflation. The latest Flow of Funds release by the US Federal Reserve shows that the private sector is continuing to delever. However there are nuances in this […]
Read more...By Mike Konczal, a Roosevelt Institute fellow who posts at New Deal 2.0 Arjun Jayadev and I have another working paper out of Roosevelt Institute, this time focusing on the labor market in the current recession. The paper is: The Stagnating Labor Market (pdf). I hope you check it out; I’m going to talk about […]
Read more...A New York Times report tonight sheds some light on the debate on whether ending tax cuts for the top 2%, which is how Obama proposes to deal with the pending expiration of Bush tax cuts, will, as low tax stalwarts contend, hurt small businesses. Although my sample is anecdotal, it strongly says not, and […]
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