I got a disturbing email from Bianco Research which showed a chart of “Private Credit Market Debt” which they say shows “Total credit market creation not including Treasury Debt, Municipal Debt and Agency Debt”.
It is actually a horror that the level of private debt peaked last year at about $36 trillion, which is certainly a [...]

Eric Fry here at The Daily Reckoning is “reporting from the Golden State with the tarnished finances”, which was a riddle that I instantly knew was, of course, California. But, for some reason, I never get asked a question when I know the answer. I usually get asked, instead, something like, “For 40% of your [...]

When a government spends money, there are only three places that money could have come from:

Taxation — by taking the money away from someone.
Borrowing — by temporarily taking the money away from someone, with a promise of returning it at a higher value.
Inflating — by printing money, which reduces the value of all the other [...]

The great monetary scientist Isaac Newton, who served as England’s Master of the Mint for 24 years, also did some ancillary work in physics.  The laws of Newtonian physics are known by nearly everyone and are often used by analogy to apply logical reasoning in other fields.  In this case, a few of these laws [...]

Christmas is fast approaching and I thought that instead of writing up my pendant to the flurry of 2010 market outlooks (it will come at some point over the Christmas), I would point you to a recent paper I read on leveraged buyouts and private equity industry. The paper is written by Steven N. Kaplan [...]

If Friday was the day Macro Man had to pay for a wet evening in the company of alcoholic beverages, it was my turn yesterday as I spent the day trying to recover from a night where the amount of alcohol consumed had been beyond excessive. Thus, as I woke up, in agony, some time [...]

For those of you who study macroeconomics and finance, here are some interesting articles on macroeconomic issues:
Menzie Chinn, The Employment Situation in the Graphs, Econobrowser, December 4, 2009 (link)
Menzie Chinn, Debt and Interest Rates; Some Empirical Evidence, November 23, 2009 (link)
Olivier Blanchard, Marianna Riggi, The Price of Oil and the Macroeconomy, Vox, December 7, 2009 [...]

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former CBO director, discussed the negative effects of the new fiscal policy in the U.S (link).

What a difference a few days have made in the mainstream headlines.
Overblown concerns about Dubai defaults are quickly shifting to the into the shadows. On Tuesday clarity on the extent of the loan restructuring indicated that Dubai World likely would restructure debt worth $26 billion against earlier talk of a possible $59 billion default.
Moving to [...]

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 [...]