February 2014

By Win Thin A little history lesson about Ukraine and Crimea may help put recent developments into better perspective. What emerges is a very clear understanding of why both Russia and Ukraine feel that they each have historical precedent…

Themes for today Emerging market political risk is now front and center. US data suggests consumption growth is vulnerable to poor wage trends. The European periphery banks are benefitting from lower sovereign yields. The potential…

News links for 28 Feb 2014

Detroit was allowed to declare bankruptcy last year. While economists often focus on the barriers to entry, by removing the stigma from bankruptcy and easing the process, it makes lowers the barriers to exit. This stands in stark contrast…

Ukraine's financial situation continued to unravel today as the currency gave up another 10% - and seems to be in free fall.

The two main drivers of the capital markets today have been the biggest one day loss in the Chinese yuan and new that the preliminary Eurozone February CPI did not tick down as many expected. The headline rate was unchanged at 0.8%, though…

By Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, Amir Kermani, James Kwak, Todd Mitton This post was originally published at Vox. Political connections affect economic outcomes in emerging markets. This column discusses new evidence showing that…

News links for 27 February 2014

The aim of the above header is to link two names in people’s minds, both of them Italian: Mario Draghi and Matteo Renzi. Naturally the idea is not original, the FT’s Peter Spiegel recently published an entire blog post (Does Renzi owe his…

Yesterday, I began my Ten Surprises List. As a reminder, the surprise list is loosely based off Byron Wien’s list of ten surprises which he has conducting doing at Blackstone and Morgan Stanley for the last thirty years. Wien defines his…