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Fitch, the ratings agency, has reversed itself on Canada. It now believes that the housing market there is poised for only modest declines at worst. Previously, Fitch had said that Canada’s housing market was well overpriced and that a…

In yesterday’s commentary, I wrote that China was attempting to rebalance its economy, which ultimately means a slowdown in its use of commodities. This has hit the commodities currencies particularly hard, with the Australian Dollar down…

Abenomics is one of the most aggressive economic experiments we have witnessed in the post-Marshall Plan developed world. The questions is whether the massive stimulus campaign can work when politically there will always be discomfort with…

Most investors are expecting 2014 to be a good year economically and for this to translate into a good year for investing. But we have never been deep into a business cycle with rates at zero or with no chance of a Fed hike on the horizon.…

I have developed a great respect for T-Mobile as a wild card in the mobile space. Their actions as the smallest of the 4 major US mobile carriers are having implications both in terms of telecom pricing and revenue models and in terms of…

On Friday, I read a post on the New York City housing market that got me to thinking about how we view interest rates and their effect on credit markets. Traditionally, we view higher interest rates as a net tightening and slowing of the…

I have some interesting ideas on the eurozone regarding France, a housing decline and its divergence from the rest of Europe. But I am going to save that for a later post. Suffice it to say the German - French spread is widening; it is at…

Clearly, most analysis for 2014 is upbeat. Economists are predicting higher global growth, higher U.S. growth, an end to the sovereign debt crisis and all manner of positive economic outcomes. And I think all of this upbeat analysis is…

In 2012, I started the subscriber newsletter out with Ten Surprises for 2012. The goal was to give Credit Writedowns Pro subscribers a list of things that investors only assigned one in three odds of occurring that I believed had a fifty…

Yesterday, the FOMC decided to reduce the pace of its large scale asset purchase program from $85 billion per month to $75 billion per month. The Fed has long wanted to taper its LSAP program and move to forward guidance to normalize policy…