April 2011

In April 1989, Mexico's external debt negotiator, Angel Gurria, asked his country's commercial bank creditors for a 55 percent haircut. This was the opening pitch of the newly created Brady Plan, which finally addressed both the debt…

Austrians and MMTers should be on the same side. After all, both camps understand the relationship between money and credit, and both understand the full ramifications of having fiat money. They should be on the same side arguing against…

Win Thin of Brown Brothers Harriman was on Bloomberg talking to Tom Keene and Michael Cloherty, head of U.S. rates strategy for fixed income and currencies at RBC Capital Markets, about the global markets for a good fifteen minutes today.…

The outcome at the embattled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant is so important to the future of nuclear power that we thought an update would be in order. The long and the short of it is that Tepco is making progress, but oh so slowly.

Regardless of the actual numbers, the housing market has one more mountain of mortgage resets to climb; it started last month and will continue through late 2012. This will only aggravate the number of foreclosures. With house prices…

George Soros makes the case for economics as a social science using his theory of reflexivity. Here are some additional thoughts to help understand why markets fail.

By Michael Lebowitz and Daniel Cohen, Absolute Investment Management Given that we can not adequately explain the enormous rise as of late and don’t believe it to be related to the weakening dollar or the economy (as gold has not…

The Bureau of Economic Analysis' (BEA) first ("Advance") estimate of the annualized growth rate of the first quarter 2011 U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was 1.75%, down significantly from the 3.11% growth rate reported for the fourth…

Joseph Gagnon of the Peterson Institute for International Economics and Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning Economics Professor from Columbia, squared off yesterday on the topic of quantitative easing. Video below. Also see my…

Now that the Fed has confirmed it won't raise rates and the dollar is dropping, for me it means that negative real rates will continue and that the currency wars are back on. I have comments on what negative real rates mean for investors. I…