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MF Global may prove to be yet another example of how meaningless the word “bonus” has become. One of the trustees overseeing the broken firm wants to pay out hundreds of thousands of dollars to three executives who used to report to Jon…

That Weidmann now wishes to publicly claim he is concerned about risk associated with the Bundesbank's Target2 credit does not simply mean that this is a truth that has now been "acknowledged". I would guess that the sober Bundesbank…

Will Germany lose its best friend in the Upright Brigade? And if so, will this encourage Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Spain etc. to question Germany-encouraged austerity policies? Spain’s prime minister has already said that the…

The enduring global crisis is giving rise to fears that economic hard times will feed political extremism, as it did in the 1930s. This column suggests that the danger of political polarisation and extremism is greatest in countries with…

In this piece Variant Perception looks at the mechanics of a currency breakup and how it would happen. This piece is longer than most of their pieces and is a slightly more wonkish piece than usual, but the first two pages provide a summary…

Looks like there’s a storm brewing in the U.S. repo markets. It figures: profit-center banks have every motivation to stay one step ahead of the regs and the pols. Since the gamekeepers have now gotten around to looking at proprietary…

This report is disturbing because of how the headline number masks real and troubling weakness in the more substantive details. Hopefully anyone trying to engineer the economy is basing their tinkering on better information than that…

We’re more than 3 years out from a crisis caused in part by these very same decision-making processes on compensation. So why is it that we don’t fully understand them yet?

The big news out of Europe on Friday was not S&P’s downgrade of 9 countries, France included. The ratings agency told us weeks ago that it might do this. No, much more important was the ECB’s saying in the bluntest possible terms that…

Is there any government body having a harder time of it these days than the SEC? Sometimes it feels like someone pinned a giant “Kick me” sign to its collective back. I’ve written previously about a key factor that I think is partly…