Is The U.K. The Canary In The Coalmine?
The new UK government proposed an ambitious program of tax cuts and energy price caps, but they took the financial markets by surprise and they balked. The ensuing sterling and […]
Is A New Financial Crisis Brewing?
Everything seems to be going well in the world economy at the moment, provided we can avoid a trade war. However, given the long expansion, a lot of leverage has […]
How Dangerous Is Emerging Markets Dollar Debt?
Two decades after the Asian crisis, emerging markets have high levels of corporate debt and especially more dollar denominated debt. This makes them quite vulnerable to external shocks to earnings, […]
How Dangerous Is The World’s Debt Problem?
High debt can lead to financial crisis. Since debt levels have risen in many countries, there is considerable reason for concern. However, big financial crises, while economically enormously harmful, are […]
Hard Money, Soft Money and Asset Bubbles
Should we raise interest rates to curb possible asset price bubbles? Answers depend on who you ask. “Hard money” people say yes, “soft money” people say no. So we’ll look […]
Have we learned nothing from the financial crisis?
The securitization of mortgages is an especially bad idea and responsible for much of the crisis because banks could absolve themselves from one of their prime economic functions, assessing creditworthyness […]
IMF lessons from the financial crisis
Oliver Blanchard, chief economist of the IMF: My generation, which was born after World War II, lived with the notion that the world was getting to be a better and […]
Rising Inequality and the Financial Crisis Revisited
Debate among the big beasts..
The End of Work?
An interesting but curious crisis narrative, can we have too much of a good thing?
An alternative rescue plan
We reported on The Paulson plan and an alternative. The essence of both is that they argue that the markets for those complex financial products are unrealistically pessimistic and prices […]