We have the specter of Greece’s finance minister insisting really, no really, it will never never default, or default via restructuring. Now given the unfortunate accident of timing, these protests sound awfully Dick Fuld like, although the better parallel is probably Mexico, which kept insisting in 1994, no way, no how would it need to […]
Read more...Let’s see….early in the days of this Administration, Treasury Secretary Geithner said some pretty critical things about China. The Chinese threw a big temper tantrum and Geithner backed down. He had tended to try to play down tensions with China over its mercantilist policies (the most important being pegging its currency at an artificially low […]
Read more...Yves here. I’m a fan of Tim’s work on the Fed beat, and consider this post on the implications of the announcement tonight of Japan’s intervention to lower the value of the yen to be particularly important. By Tim Duy, the Director of Undergraduate Studies of the Department of Economics at the University of Oregon […]
Read more...This blog tends to steer away from short-term market commentary because, as the wags say, “If you must forecast, forecast often,” and keeping tabs on the whims of Mr. Market can easily become an exercise in futility. Getting a sense of conditions on the ground and likely business/economic trajectories is a fraught activity even in […]
Read more...Wolfgang Munchau in the Financial Times gives a good recap as to why the recent spell of good cheer regarding the Eurozone is overdone. His central observation is that the Eurozone, like the US, patched things up with duct tape and bailing wire, and the hope was that the resumption of peppy growth would reduce […]
Read more...By Marshall Auerback, a portfolio strategist and Roosevelt Institute fellow A few years ago, Chris Dialynas and I wrote a piece which introduced the concept of “renegade economics”. It was derived from a Frank D. Graham’s 1943 essay titled, “Fundamentals of International Monetary Policy.” Graham, a Princeton University economist, wrote: “In international affairs we must […]
Read more...Martin Wolf, in today’s Financial Times, argues that the eurozone has done wonders for Germany by allowing it to keep the value of its currency down. With Germany’s persistent, large trade surpluses, the value of the deutschemark would eventually have risen, dampening Germany’s trade surpluses and forcing it either to accept a higher level of […]
Read more...The end of the US summer holiday period is upon us, and with it, a return to reality. The markets are again concerned re Eurobanks, as the fears registered in EU periphery country bond spreads are now registering with investors in other markets. Per Bloomberg: The gaps between 10- year German bond yields and those […]
Read more...During the global financial crisis, after each acute phase, there would be a period of relief in which conditions returned to a semblance of normalcy, and policymakers and investors carried on as if acting as if all was well would make it so. Unfortunately, positive thinking provided only temporary relief from the undertow of rising […]
Read more...Lordie, if this isn’t disingenuous, I don’t know what is. From the Financial Times: US universities are producing too few engineers to meet industry demand, Indian outsourcing companies say, leaving such businesses little choice but to hire foreign skilled workers to fill jobs in America And why are there so few students studying computer science? […]
Read more...Wolfgang Munchau has an intriguing piece at the Financial Times debunking the idea the Germany’s recent peppy growth numbers are as salutary as Mr. Market seems to believe. Part of his message isn’t necessarily all that surprising, and comes towards the end of the article: ….it is important to keep some perspective and not draw […]
Read more...Beijing-based fiance professor and commentator Michael Pettis gives a typically sobering outlook in a Financial Times comment today, seeing the seemingly irresistible force of trade surplus countries’ resistance to shifting towards more internal generated demand colliding with the immovable object of trade deficit countries’ inability to tolerate the high unemployment rates that result for a […]
Read more...John Plender in his comment at the Financial Times, “Great dangers attend the rise and fall of great powers,” does a fine job given the space constraints of discussing the fraught process of changes in global economic and political leadership. I thought it would be useful to quote Plender at length, with some additional observations, […]
Read more...When I was on C-SPAN the weekend before last, I got a call I didn’t quite know how to field. It was from someone who by his accent was obviously Indian. He claimed that Indians represented 35% of the managers in American companies, and that American visa restrictions meant that they were all going to […]
Read more...Even though 2010 is proving to be a much happier year than 2009 for carriers and ports, weak consumer sentiment and rising odds of further deterioration in the economy has the operators of the big West Coast ports, Los Angeles and Long Beach, worried that a solid July will not prove to be a precursor […]
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