The-big-picture, global economic developments.
Much discussion on the inter-tubes post the Obama/Dem landslide about the need to get the global economy going and at the same time resolve the clear problems with the de-facto Bretton Woods II arrangement in which the poor emerging economies finance consumption in the rich US, UK and EU.
Martin Wolf does a good job laying [...]
Well, Barack Hussein Obama is in – the 44th President of the Unite States – with a solid Democratic majority in the Congress and the Senate, and the right to appoint 2 or 3 new Supreme Court justices for life. When Ohio voted Democratic for the first time since Lincoln the race was all but [...]
In anticipation of my time freeing up in 24 hours or so, here’s some last-minute analysis from the best election site I’ve come across (and they keep on getting better): http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/
McCain, to win, absolutely HAS to win Florida, Georgia, Missouri, Indiana and Montana; and almost certainly both Ohio and North Carolina.
Obama will win if he [...]
For example, Charles I of England. There is no doubt that cash has been good to hold over the past year, US dollars and yen especially as everyone squared their accounts.
But Morgan Stanley doesn’t believe in deflation, and neither do I.
Although headline prices likely will decline sharply in coming months, underlying inflation over [...]
We’ve moved from the imminent collapse of bank balance sheets and trade credit to the work-out phase, both in the real economy and for the national debt now underpinning the banks.
Tim Duy via Economist’s View says:
Once the deleveraging is complete, foreign investors will realize they are now awash in Dollar denominated assets at [...]
Kedrosky has a chart of major currencies showing only the Yen is holding it’s own, indeed rising, against the USD over the past two months.
Update, an even better chart:
Brad Setser also notes that this dollar strength was not global investors fleeing to a “safe” currency.
Net TIC flows in August (line 30) were essentially [...]
Greg Ip quantifies the level of intervention thus far, and warns that there could be far more to come.
Before the crisis began, the Fed had $868 billion of assets, 91 percent of them in innocuous Treasury bills and bonds. Now it has $1.6 trillion in assets, with less than 30 percent of them [...]
I apologize to regular readers (if any) but I’ve been on the road for more than a week. Meetings and keeping up with the game of musical markets combined with some too-good-to-miss leisure activities to keep me from putting finger to keypad.
I’m currently in Manila for an ASEAN workshop/conference which was meant to be about [...]
One of the problems with this credit collapse –- and peak oil, and global warming for that matter — is that they move like glaciers, slowly but inexorably, and humans generally don’t seem to be evolved to sustain attention on large things that take a long time. We gleefully scamper about, picking up pennies in [...]
Could this economic data be the reason for the urgency in bailing out the Wall Street banks?
Initial filings for state jobless benefits increased by a seasonally adjusted 32,000 to 493,000 in the third week of September… the highest number of weekly claims since Sept. 29, 2001, when unemployment soared in the wake of [...]