Following up on my “Sell equities” post, I want to highlight a factoid from today’s David Rosenberg’s Breakfast with Dave distribution.
Never before has the S&P 500 rallied 60% from a low in such a short time frame as six months. And never before have we seen the S&P 500 rally 60% over an interval in [...]

Marshall Auerback here. I have been posting at an interesting new site called New Deal 2.0. You may have seen Edward linking out to articles on the site.
Edward saw an article I wrote there recently and asked me to post it here as well to highlight a recurrent theme at Credit Writedowns – namely that [...]

Say I’m a politician and I am concerned about my re-election prospects in 2010.  I have been a member of Congress for seven years now and have developed a good reputation as a reform-minded economic realist willing to listen to a number of competing economic ideas. However, right now I am a bit concerned [...]

Back in February, I asked you if we were experiencing a recession or depression.  A plurality said it was a depression with a small ’d.’ I agreed and went on to explain why. Since then, things have changed and we seem to be on the verge of what I call a technical recovery (or a [...]

In a BBC Two interview, former Fed chief Alan Greenspan waxed fatalistic, saying that another financial crisis is inevitable due to animal spirits.  In his view, booms and busts are endogenous to the capitalist system, crises being the outcome of long periods of prosperity. I agree with this assessment. But, it is surprising to hear [...]

You have heard me use the phrase “liquidity is seeking return” to describe the increase in the price of riskier assets due to monetary stimulus. The Bloomberg News video clip below points to an increase in lending for buyers of riskier loans like high yield and mortgage bonds.

The blurb below from the associated article at [...]

This new period of boom-bust makes for some very strange bedfellows.  Below is the video of Henry Blodget, the former Oppenheimer and Merrill Lynch Technology analyst, talking to Eliot Spitzer, the former New York attorney general who chased him out of the securities industry.
Both men have suffered major reputational damage and are trying hard to [...]

Late last year, I anticipated that the global slowdown would bring China’s GDP growth down to 2%, a level that would make most nations envious but which would have been catastrophic for China.  In the end, robust government stimulus has saved the day, as spending for infrastructure, commodities, and property has soared.  The 8% growth [...]

Jeremy Grantham is out again with a very important investment strategy piece entitled “Boring Fair Price!”  He leads off by talking about how markets went from extremely overvalued a year ago to cheap back to a state which he considers fair value.  But, he sees the recent rally as a speculative rally which is a [...]

In late June, I posted two items China’s present growth story is built on malinvestment and Chinese stock market bubble inflating, on the building bubble in Chinese lending and asset markets.  The crux of the pots was that China, in its efforts to reflate the economy to meet very high growth short-term targets and start [...]