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I recorded the video segment below on on RT America on Wednesday night (Notice my green tie for St. Patrick’s Day!). The overall gist of the clip was that the currency battle now brewing between China and the U.S. is mostly a political confrontation. There are reasonable ways out of this that don’t include a [...]

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Notable quotes in this 5 minute segment:
"They don’t want to look in the mirror. America doesn’t have a China problem. It really has a savings problem. America has the biggest shortfall of national savings of any leading country in modern history. And when you don’t have saving you have to run current account deficits to [...]

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Here’s how I see things playing out:

Congress looks at this report and concurs that the key to ending slower global growth is to correct global imbalances via a Chinese currency revaluation. Fair enough.
However, individual Congressmen, looking to reassure jobless constituents ahead of the midterm elections, will escalate by presenting bills to ‘punish’ China if [...]

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In late 2007 the global economy began to stumble, slipping into the abyss of a deep recession and financial panic. We are only now recovering from this stumble, in large part due to an unprecedented level of fiscal and monetary stimulus. Yet, no sooner is daylight within reach, we start attacking each other, tearing each [...]

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News reports are now surfacing that the Germans are open to IMF involvement in the Greece sovereign debt crisis.  This is a 180-degree turn for the German finance minister who has expressed vocal opposition to the IMF’s involvement in ‘internal’ European Union affairs.
Bloomberg reports Germany making the shift to avoid being boxed in by a [...]

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I am going to talk here a little bit about the looming trade war between China and the United States. But I am going to come at it from a side angle via some historical analogies.
Common folklore in the United States says that the Soviet Empire collapsed in large part due to the efforts of [...]

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With US midterm elections up ahead, we are already seeing political posturing by US politicians regarding China’s currency.  Democratic lawmakers are reportedly drawing up legislation that sets criteria on whether a country has a misaligned currency.  It would modify the current US Treasury semi-annual report to misalignment instead of manipulation.  The House Ways and Means [...]

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It’s curious how one and the same message is emanating from both Beijing and Berlin at the moment: “don’t blame us, it’s not our fault”. And it isn’t.
According to the Financial Times, the Chinese Authorities spent their morning pushing back against the mounting US criticism of their currency policy, arguing that their huge trade surplus [...]

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The Financial Times has caught wind of a letter sent by U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to to the EU’s Michel Barnier. In only thinly-veiled language Mr. Geithner accused the EU of financial protectionism for the way Brussels is moving forward with rules to regulate hedge funds and other parts of the shadow banking system. [...]

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August 2009 was the high point of American’s satisfaction with the economy during Barack Obama’s tenure. Interestingly, this meshes with the data on the ground. In a recent interview, Simoleon Sense quoted James Montier as saying that his favourite real-time economic indicator is the ADS Business Conditions Index charted below (hat tip Philly Fed [...]