Politics

By Marc Chandler The US dollar is consolidating last week's losses in largely uneventful activity.  In fact, consolidation is the general theme in the broader capital markets as well.   Equity markets are narrowly mixed, with the MSCI Asia…

The lead article in today's links is from Seumas Milne in the Guardian on George Osborne's failure to deliver on his promises as UK Chancellor of the Exchequer. If you recall, the platform that Osborne championed was one of voluntary cuts…

The big news today is based on a report by Bild, a German tabloid, which reported that Jens Weidmann, the head of Germany's central bank, offered to resign on multiple occasions due to his opposition to the ECB's plans to monetize euro zone…

I wrote a piece in the New York Times that appeared yesterday along with Mark Thoma and John Cochrane. The question was "Should the Fed Risk Inflation to Spur Growth?" My answer was that the Fed should always keep an eye on inflation as…

Last year I predicted that the route that Europe would go would be fiscal integration coupled with explicit mechanisms for allowing an exit from the euro zone. For example, in November during the Italian crisis I wrote: I continue to…

This is just a quick follow-up to my article on ECB sovereign debt yield caps. I don’t think the ECB is about to put ceilings on euro area sovereign debt yields. The speculation generated by the Spiegel article is not warranted in my view.

Here's another Tech Ticker segment on the state of the economy. Noted economic bear Gary Shilling believes the US is in recession or will be entering one shortly. His view is that wages have not grown robustly enough to warrant the level of…

Simply cutting the deficit back and cleaning up bank balance sheets won’t get the economy back to growth. Indeed this habit of continually getting behind the curve, and trying vainly now that the economy is spiralling almost out of control…

And going beyond April, the political arithmetic of a post Monti government looks complicated, making the kind of stability needed to advance what the population may well see as “harsh” reforms unlikely. In other words, as Monti says, when…

Mario Draghi has a specific plan in mind for how the ECB will be able to arrest the sovereign debt crisis. Two Bloomberg central bank sources told the news agency that ECB President Draghi will have talks with Bundesbank President Jens…