The Eurozone’s current problems are not mainly a result a of prolifigate and reckless spending of government resources in the Eurozone periphery [1]. Even nobel laureate Paul Krugman has begun to forcefully push this argument arguing that the real source of the malaise is the steady build up internal Eurozone imbalances. I only conditionally agree. [...]

Though I have written extensively about the Recession of 1920, it is worth revisiting it per Glenn Beck’s show last night.  Beck rightly pointed out that the policies of decreased taxes and decreased government spending implemented by both Harding and Coolidge paved the way for the dramatic economic growth of the roaring 20s. What Beck [...]

Sometimes no news is more telling than one might initially think and although it was hardly earth shattering for the market that the BOJ chose yesterday to keep its main benchmark rate sitting at 0.1% it does highlight the extraordinary difficulties Japan currently face in terms of sparking its economy back into some kind of [...]

1. The interest rate is a price – the price of credit like the price of any good.  In a free market the price would be set like the price of any good at the intersection of the supply of funds (our savings), and demand for funds (businesses’ and individuals’ investing [...]

Howard Davies was a deputy governor of the Bank of England, and the first head of the UK FSA. He is one of the world’s leading thinkers on financial regulation and monetary policy, and one of the people who combines skills in both finance and monetary economics. In a recent article, he focuses [...]

 On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve underscored that the U.S. economy is picking up steam but reassured observers that inflation is in check that that it will keep short-term interest rates near zero for an “extended period.”
In their statement after the meeting, the members concluded that the US economy has continued to “pick up,” that declines [...]

Reserve Bank of Australia decided to continue the increase in benchmark interest rates by 25 basis points to 3.75 percent in the light of short-term inflationary expectations (link). Here (link) is a brief macroeconomic outlook of Australia.

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, [...]

The excellent research edifice at the Bank of International Settlements have conjured up one of those papers which needed to be written (by Claudio Borio and Piti Disyatat) on the back of the myriad of different monetary policy responses we have observed in the contex of the economic crisis. The abstract and conclusion look as [...]

The Economist updated the report on the Japanese economy which again suffered from monthly deflation (link). The forecasts for the end of the year forsee deflation as a structural problem of the Japanese economy and not as a short-term phenomena that would reflect temporary declines in domestic or foreign demand. True, the financial crisis and [...]