Marshall Auerback here with some thoughts on the UK given the recent stellar performance of Sterling.

“The Conservative belief that there is some law of nature which prevents men from being employed, that it is ‘rash’ to employ men, and that it is financially ‘sound’ to maintain a tenth of the population in idleness for an [...]

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Marshall Auerback here with a few thoughts about the monetary policy end game.

Bernanke has to continue to make hawkish comments about inflation so as to avoid a complete blow out in bond yields, but the the dirty little secret is that inflation is the way out of the debt trap, along with [...]

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Marshall Auerback here. Yesterday, Ed made a big to-do about China’s increase in gold reserves. I am going to take a different view here.

CLSA is saying that the increase is from purification and miscellaneous transactions since all the way back to 2003 so that it was not a recent open market purchases but accumulation of 6 years of this process. If this is the situation, then this news really is not as significant as people think.

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Marshall Auerback here with a few thoughts about this economic cycle, external imbalances, fiscal stimulus, and current account deficits.

This is not the Great Depression. We are going to have “muddle through” here precisely because we lack the courage to deficit spend on the magnitude we did in World War II. We are spending too much [...]

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Marshall Auerback here. Remind me again what Larry Summers was talking about when he spoke of the US as being a “nation of laws”, where “sanctity of contract” is sacrosanct?
In a case of first impression that could have far-reaching implications, a bankruptcy judge in California recently determined that municipalities that file petitions under Chapter [...]

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OK, well this is just an actor in a comedy skit from Saturday Night Live getting angry.  But, it is pretty funny… Continue reading

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It is almost like they are trying to manipulate the market prices on a day to day basis.

At best the total $300 billion is probably less than 1/5th of total treasury issuance (not counting TARP, etc, for fiscal 2010).

By the way, I calculated that Treasury interest cost has decreased and is running around $250 Billion, [...]

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Marshall Auerback here.

I do not like the Geithner Plan because it is needlessly expensive. Nevertheless, it could well work. My main objection is that it constitutes the most regressive transfer of wealth in history and it’s being done BY A DEMOCRAT ADMINISTRATION!!!! Unbelievable.

It has to be done this way in terms of securing funding for [...]

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From the Wall Street Journal:

In the latest dramatic move by federal authorities to prop up the nation’s banking system, regulators late Friday seized control of the two largest wholesale credit unions in the U.S. after finding that their losses on mortgage-related securities were even larger than previously thought.

U.S. Central Corporate Federal Credit Union and Western [...]

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You may have seen Ed’s post “Gillian Tett: Washington is talking to Swedes about banking crisis solutions” a week back about how the U.S. government was getting ready to talk to Swedish officials regarding the banking crisis. This is a very important development and I have a lot more to provide below on the issue as it pertains to today’s events and Japan’s crisis early this decade.

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