A few days ago I wrote a post “Japanese defend dollar’s status while China tears it down” in which I defended the Japanese support of the dollar, saying it was in no one’s interest to see a change in the currency markets right now.  I have to admit this was wrong-headed and short-sighted.  In truth, [...]

Laura Tyson, an advisor to President Barack Obama, said in a speech to day in the lead up to the –8 conference that the ground work for a potential second stimulus bill must be laid now. To be sure, the G-8 leaders are expected to recommend continued policy accommodation worldwide. However, Vice President Joe Biden [...]

Here is a Marc Faber interview from March. It is well worth watching because he calls things perfectly through June: economic news, equity markets, and commodity markets.
This is billed as a Czech TV interview.  But the audio is pretty bad. So, the interviewer may be a Czech with halting English, but this is hardly [...]

In the lead-up to next week’s G8 summit, the Chinese have been making yet more noises about setting up a new monetary system without the dollar as its anchor and leading reserve currency.  The Chinese, who have maintained a export orientation which has made them the largest holder of U.S. government bonds, are concerned that [...]

With more and more major economists predicting recovery sometime later this year, many have forgotten that downside risks remain.  Berner, Roubini, Volcker, Krugman and Bernanke have all come out essentially saying they would not be surprised to see a ‘technical’ recovery at some point later this year.  Robert Gordon has gone as far as to [...]

Will Hutton has a pretty good interview with Paul Krugman in the Guardian newspaper.  The exchange is quite long, so it gives you a fairly broad understanding of Krugman’s view on the global economy and specific country economies.  What I found especially interesting was Krugman’s admission that we are essentially flying blind.
The Federal Reserve has [...]

Marc Faber participated in a roundtable discussion on CNBC this morning about the dreadful figures coming out of Europe (see articles here and here).
At one point, the German CNBC correspondent made a very good comment about Eastern Europe getting killed by a falloff in internal demand due to a severe banking crisis and this being [...]

China is holding its own in regards to economic growth because the government is pumping massive amounts of government money into the economy in order to make up for the loss in trade.  What does this mean for China, Chinese shares and the global economy?
The Bloomberg video below makes the bullish case for China and [...]

We are starting to get a sense of who the winners and losers of the Great Unraveling are. Spain is definitely a loser.
Just think, a few years ago Spain was the envy of Western Europe with a dynamic and booming property market and prodigious GDP growth. The country was THE holiday-maker’s paradise, with many buying [...]

This past week, I caught an article in Wirschaftswoche (WiWo), the German Business Week, which suggested that the South Koreans were very confident about their economy and had learned from the Asian Crisis.
Just today, the South Koreans released GDP numbers that many would find amazing, showing that the economy grew 0.1% in the first quarter [...]