I imagine that many readers will react as I did to the Washington Post story, “In China, Wal-Mart presses suppliers on labor, environmental standards” (hat tip reader Paul S): that this story, yet another tidbit supporting the Bentonville giant’s supposed conversion to the true green camp, has to make sense on a cold-blooded P&L basis, […]
Read more...Bloomberg reports that former Treasury Secretary and Citigroup board member Robert Rubin will be summoned before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in April, with Alan Greenspan and Chuck Prince likely to be tapped as well. On the one hand, it’s a welcome sign that the FCIC will be interviewing many of the major figures responsible […]
Read more...The Wall Street Journal is not the first to comment on the magnitude of the wagers against the euro (the Financial Times took note nearly two weeks ago: “Speculators raise record bets against euro“). But the Journal offers a spectacle sure to inflame sentiment in Europe: that of major hedge funds feasting first on lemon-roasted […]
Read more...The financial press has for the most part looked at the possibility of sovereign debt crises in Greece, Spain, and Portugal through a deal-making window: will Germany and other EU surplus countries back a rescue package, and if so, with what strings attached? There has certainly been ample speculation, particularly since a bailout of Greece […]
Read more...Martin Wolf, the Financial Times’ highly respected chief economics commentor, weighs in with a pretty pessimistic piece tonight. This makes for a companion to Peter Boone and Simon Johnson’s Doomsday cycle post from yesterday. Let us cut to the chase of Wolf’s argument: Now, after the implosion, we witness the extraordinary rescue efforts. So what […]
Read more...Kenneth Rogoff, former IMF chief economist warned that a series of sovereign debt defaults is likely to be in the offing. From Bloomberg: Following banking crises, “we usually see a bunch of sovereign defaults, say in a few years. I predict we will again,” Rogoff,…said at a forum in Tokyo today. He said financial markets […]
Read more...By Marshall Auerback, a fund manager and investment strategist and L. Randall Wray, a Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City In recent weeks there has been much discussion about what to do about Greece. These questions become all the more relevant as the country attempts to float a multibillion-euro bond issue later […]
Read more...I’m surprised the little conundrum has not dawned on the officialdom sooner. Any return to safer practices means less leverage and less freely available credit. Less freely available credit, short term and maybe even intermediate term, means less rapid growth (with a binge as big as we had, the drying-out will take time), although it […]
Read more...By Marshall Auerback, a fund manager and investment strategist who writes for New Deal 2.0 and Yves Smith Conventional wisdom holds that the Chinese are due (as in overdue) for a revaluation of their currency, the renminbi. For instance, a recent report from Goldman argues that China will raise the value of the RMB against […]
Read more...The short answer to the question in the headline is “When there are no rules.” A headline in a current Bloomberg story illustrates the problem: “Goldman Sachs, Greece Didn’t Disclose Swap, Investors ‘Fooled’.” “Fooled” is an unusual choice of words, particularly when applied to to presumed grown-ups like institutional investors and international overseers. Bloomberg seems […]
Read more...By Marshall Auerback, a fund manager and investment strategist who writes for New Deal 2.0. Surprise, surprise: Wall Street tactics akin to the ones that fostered subprime mortgages in America have worsened the financial crisis shaking Greece, Spain, Portugal, and undermined the euro by enabling European governments to hide their mounting debts. This has now […]
Read more...The latest move in the “so what are we gonna do about Greece?” EU vs. Greece drama was that Greece was playing non-negotiable, saying it had agreed to reduce its fiscal deficit by 4% of GDP (from over 12.7% to 8.7%) and it was premature to talk about doing more at this juncture. That posture […]
Read more...Several readers pointed to a recent post by Michael Pettis, which mainly discussed how expected wage increases in China are a hopeful sign that China is taking steps to become more consumption-oriented. But as much as this is a move forward, changing the mix of China’s composition of demand is at least a decade-long project […]
Read more...A fair number of policy commentators are hewing to the view that somehow the EU will cobble together some sort of solution to the Greek fiscal mess because the alternatives look vasty worse. As Paul Krugman noted: Now what? A breakup of the euro is very nearly unthinkable, as a sheer matter of practicality. As […]
Read more...In a New York Times op-ed late last year, Bill Black, Frank Partnoy, and Eliot Spitzer called for an open source investigation: we know where the answers are. They are in the trove of e-mail messages still backed up on A.I.G. servers, as well as in the key internal accounting documents and financial models generated […]
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