Although I certainly would not rank it alongside Macro Man’s dreaded vacation indicator or the incipient increase in the USD if and when the Economist finally decides to slot its decline on the front page, I still have the nagging feeling that whenever yours truly sit down at either a dull and difficult econometrics lecture [...]

Sheikh Makhtoum won’t go to debtor’s prison, but short of that, Dubai’s all-but-sovereign default is an epochal event in its story. I wrote a column in Financial Express titled Dubai’s great crash where I draw on this episode to think more clearly about (a) International financial centres and (b) Puffery. On this subject, [...]

Congress needs to enact a single national policy to support any state in crises.

Sometime in the next couple of months The Federal Government is going to give the state of California a lot of money. After lavishing more than a trillion dollars on Banks, Insurers and Auto Companies, there is a 0% probability that the government will sit idly while the largest state collapses.
There [...]

It was a few weeks since I had seen Jim, so I made the mistake of asking him what he had been doing. He replied that he had been thinking about bankruptcy.
I said that I didn’t know his financial situation was that bad. Jim replied that he wasn’t having too much trouble paying his own [...]

One of the most draconian and counterproductive interventions of the New Deal was the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. Not only did it effectively end the gold standard and establish a fascistic regulatory environment that undermined the global competitiveness of the U.S. banking industry, it also established the sham known as the FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance [...]