Share
Edward wrote a piece about Japan’s government net asset value falling below zero. He thought it would make sense if I gave you an alternative view using Richard Koo’s latest thinking about the Japanese experience, especially given the parallels to the U.S. regarding balance sheet recessions.
Before I get to Koo, I should add that, for [...]

Share
The following is a post which first appeared at the Big Picture from Paul Brodsky & Lee Quaintance who run QB Partners, a private macro-oriented investment fund based in New York.
—
We Are All Austrians Now
Things are different this time, as they always are. The great difference between today’s capital markets and those since World [...]

Share
In the wake of news about President Obama’s new Too Big to Fail Tax and Barry Ritholtz’s post on it, I had an in-depth conversation on the issue with a whole group of people, including Barry. Most of the group was all for the tax.  I am not, as I recently laid out in an [...]

Share
On a number of occasions, I have pointed to the sectoral balances model of finance to help demonstrate what happens when the government sector runs a deficit or a surplus. A recent article in the Financial Times by Martin Wolf on Japan’s woes highlights this subject and demonstrates how government deficits balance private sector saving. [...]

Share
Calculated Risk has a post out today called Bubbles and Employment. The gist of the post is that interest rates play a role in creating bubbles as demonstrated by data on employment and common property yard-sticks like price-to-rent and price/earnings ratios. The graphs presented make the case quite well.
CR finishes the article saying:
Since the recovery [...]

Share
Unadjusted jobless claims after the holiday season are always monstrous because of seasonality. Last week 645,571 people filed initial claims for unemployment insurance in the United States.  That is down from the 731,958 who filed at this time last year. Looking at the seasonally adjusted numbers, claims rose from to 434,000 last week from 433,000 [...]

Share
About three months ago, Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman took a stab at explaining why economists didn’t anticipate the worst financial crisis in three-quarters of a century. His was a long piece, taking up eight pages and 6,000 words at the New York Times website. His overview was certainly one of the best in [...]

Share
Yesterday, I indicated I would write a few thematic posts as a look back at some of the more important economic topics that this credit crisis has uncovered. Tying posts together in a theme definitely gives a better holistic view of a the themes than the posts do in isolation. But I also enjoy writing [...]

Share

Watchdog fines Depfa €250,000 over suspected breach of rules – Independent.ie
Gold slumps to seven-week low
Geithner Voices Confidence About Economic Rebound : NPR
FT.com – Glencore bond deal paves way for IPO (For a company that looked headed for collapse this time last year, this is a remarkable turnaround – thanks to a rebound [...]

Share
As we approach the new year, I have decided to write a few thematic posts as a look back at some of the more important economic topics that this credit crisis has uncovered. The thinking is that tying posts together in a theme might give a better holistic view of a few themes than the [...]