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This comes via the FT:
Latvia’s prime minister has warned Swedish banks they risk choking off recovery in the Baltic state’s crisis-hit economy unless they resume lending.
Banks such as Swedbank and SEB, which dominate the Latvian market, have reined in credit as they struggle to contain rising bad loans amid the deepest recession in the European [...]

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Note: this post originally was posted without correct attribution to Bill Mitchell, who writes a blog called Billy Blog where he had posted the thoughts now attributed to him below. Bill is a well-regarded Professor of Economics at the University of Newcastle in Australia who blogs on macroeconomics, banking, and related topics.
I would like [...]

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When asked about monetary policy by Sen. David Vitter earlier this month, Ben Bernanke gave the following response.
The public’s understanding of the Federal Reserve’s commitment to price stability helps to anchor inflation expectations and enhances the effectiveness of monetary policy, thereby contributing to stability in both prices and economic activity. Indeed, the longer-run inflation expectations [...]

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There has been quite a lot of hub-bub today about President Obama’s fat cat remarks and his meeting with bankers exhorting them to lend. Let me tie these events in with a few other themes into a comprehensive picture of what is happening in politics and banking.
In a nutshell, we are getting a bunch of [...]

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A friend Scott caught this article on Bloomberg about the latest economic figures out of Japan:
Japan’s economy expanded less than a third of the pace initially reported in the three months to September as companies slashed spending.
Gross domestic product rose at an annual 1.3 percent pace, slower than the 4.8 percent reported in preliminary figures [...]

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This is an important question which Brad DeLong asks (Hat tip Mark Thoma). Here’s the logic:
Right now, if you ask the decisive members of congress—by which I mean the Blue Dog Democrats in the House, or the most conservative Democrats and most liberal Republicans in the Senate —why the president and the Congress are not [...]

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"This is definitely a threat on the horizon," said Blaise Ganguin, the agency’s European credit chief.
Some 75 companies large enough to be rated face likely default in 2010 as the slow-burn effects of the crisis hit home. The default rate peaked near 13pc this year, the highest since S&P began to collect data.

This [...]

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Nouriel Roubini, writing in the New York Daily News , said on Sunday that “unemployed Americans should hunker down for more job losses” given the likelihood of a job less recovery. This was as gloomy a piece as I have seen from Roubini in the past few months. He has clearly become more downbeat about [...]

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A friend sent me the following presentation earlier in the week when I was feeling a bit ill. So I neglected to post it.  But, I want to return to it because it is in keeping with my recovery/depression theme. These are the issues that were complicit in the latest financial crisis and almost none [...]

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Marshall Auerback here with a few thoughts on money, the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet, and the alphabet soup of emergency liquidity facilities.
The expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet has been widely misunderstood within the economics profession, because it has been viewed through the lens of a pre-existing debate about the monetary transmission mechanism. Those who [...]