Credit Writedowns

One Greek outstanding bond is a 450 mln euro FRN that is due May 15. It has a 30-day grace period to make the payment, according to press reports. The new Greek 10-year bond yield rose today to 20.55%. It is the fifth consecutive session…

In Paul Krugman’s view, banks are not very important since all they do is to intermediate between savers and investors, taking in deposits and packaging them into loans. Now, I know that Krugman’s own specialty is not money and banking, so…

Despite comparisons with Greece, Portugal is not in entirely the same situation, at least not yet it isn't. Crucially, Portugal is currently under no obligation to deal with international or national creditors to increasing government debt…

The US dollar is marginally softer as North American players return to their posts. The better-than-expected official Chinese manufacturing PMI (53.1 from 51.0 in Feb and consensus for 50.5) saw steeper losses in the greenback, but the…

The debate between Paul Krugman and my friend Steve Keen regarding how banks work (see here, here, here, and here) has caused me to revisit an old quote. Back in the 1990s I would use Krugman’s book, Peddling Prosperity (1995), in my…

Paul Krugman’s claim that those who argue banks play an essential role in macroeconomics are “Banking Mystics” has a natural riposte: Neoclassical economists like Krugman who believe that capitalism can be modelled without either money or…

I had intended my commentary here to be on US interest rates but i have already written that (silver level) post. So I will refer you there. Instead, I will mention Europe again because the links are filled with European stories.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has been guest lecturing at George Washington University, giving students a four-part series of talks entitled "The Federal Reserve and the Financial Crisis". Below are the slides that accompanied his…

The Free Exchange blog at The Economist has accepted my bet, and very cleverly (the bastards!) they have added a second one. For two years I have been arguing that a Chinese rebalancing will require much slower GDP growth rates than we…

Yesterday, John Carney at CNBC had a nice little post comparing Hyman Minsky's Financial Instability Hypothesis with some of the thinking by Friedrich von Hayek behind Austrian Business Cycle Theory. John rightly points to this passage as…