Jan 23rd, 2012
Levitra side affects: before starting on the subject of debt I wanted to make a quick reference to something sent to me by Charles Horner, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. I am glad to say that the overinvestment thesis is much more widely acknowledged today than it was even two or three years [...]
Jan 9th, 2012
Europe’s underlying problem is not budget deficits or even unsustainable debt. These are mainly symptoms. The real problem with Europe is the huge divergence in costs between the core and the periphery – in the past decade costs between Germany and some of the peripheral countries have diverged by anywhere from 20% to 40%. This [...]
Dec 17th, 2011
Two weeks ago on Wednesday night, after the Chinese markets closed, the People’s Bank of China announced that it had cut the minimum reserve requirement by 50 basis points to 21% for the large banks, and lower for the smaller banks. With the announcement coming just hours before announcements by the Fed, the ECB and [...]
Dec 3rd, 2011
For years I have been arguing that the Achilles heel of the Chinese growth model is the unsustainable rise in debt that comes as a necessary consequence of capital misallocation fueled by bank lending. Capital misallocation, I argued, was the nearly inevitable consequence of high investment growth over many years in a system in which [...]
Nov 21st, 2011
Much of the latest issue of the newsletter, sent out two weeks ago, was on disaggregating the trading performance of the RMB to separate market sentiment from PBoC actions, but since this was pretty technical stuff I am not including it in this blog entry. This means that once again most [...]
Nov 6th, 2011
I have already discussed last month why I think the desperate attempts by Europe to get China and other Asian and BRIC countries to bail out the weak sovereign borrowers is absurd, but the topic has become so important in the past two weeks, at least judging by the number of calls I have received [...]
Nov 1st, 2011
Levitra doses: last week’s Senate bill on Chinese currency intervention predictably enough brought out all the same old arguments about international trade, and just as predictably has hardened the opposing positions in the debate. Unfortunately the difference between a good outcome, intelligently negotiated, and a bad outcome, is pretty large, but with each side hardening its [...]
Oct 16th, 2011
My friend Mark Williams sent me last week a reference to a very interesting paper written by Malhar Nabar, an economist at the IMF. The paper is called “Targets, Interest Rates, and Household Saving in Urban China” and in it Nabar tries to measure the impact of changes in the real deposit rate on changes [...]
Oct 6th, 2011
I spent the end of last week in Washington DC during the IMF/World Bank meetings.Needless to say this has been a pretty gloomy trip and most of the people I spoke to or heard speak had only bad things to say about the global economy. What’s more, given how bad the markets were this week, [...]
Sep 25th, 2011
Slow growth is embedding itself solidly into the US economy and the bond mayhem in Europe continues. The external environment for China is getting worse. This will almost certainly make China’s adjustment – when Beijing finally gets serious about it – all the more difficult. With still weak domestic consumption growth, and little chance of [...]
Sep 12th, 2011
In the past two years a lot of analysts have been warning that the US and/or Europe are about to turn “Japanese”. By this I guess they mean that very high levels of debt are going to set the stage for one or two decades of economic stagnation and zero growth. I am not sure [...]
Sep 7th, 2011
I will have a new post out over the weekend, but I recently had a piece published by Foreign Policy on why keeping the dollar as the world’s dominant reserve currency is a drag on the US economy; buy canada levitra. You can find the piece here. – buy canada levitra
Aug 28th, 2011
Markets have been crazy this month, but rather than try to wade through all the news, much of which doesn’t seem to have much informational content, I thought I would duck out altogether and instead make a list of things I expect will happen over the next several years; medication levitra.We are so caught up [...]