Quite often I am asked when I think somethig is going to happen. I usually say, if I could give an accurate time frame I’d be either very rich indeed or on a black bag flight to nowhere. Luckily for me I am notoriously bad at guessing time frames. I usually call things far too …
I have been sitting here listening and thinking, feeling vaguely guilty that I haven’t written anything. I have been watching what seemed a perplexingly contradictory series of events and facts. And it has led me to consider this – too often, when we think and even more so when we speak, we do so in …
America is in debt. So in debt that Congress had to raise what they call the Debt Ceiling, which is the statutory limit on Federal debt. The idea of enshrining a maximum permissable debt ceiling in law, was to set a limit and force any administration to keep debts down. It didn’t work. All that …
I have written a lot about how I think there are now two economies. Ours and the bank’s. Here is a glimpse of the sort of evidence that convinces me it is true. Just from today. Portugal’s rating was downgraded again today. This time by two more notches because of continuing ‘concerns’ that Portugal’s financial …
You know that phrase, “You can’t have your cake and eat it too”? Well aparently you can if you’re a US bank. The US suspended all mark to market requirements for bank assets back in 08. Since the banking crisis took hold and bank assets became valueless, banks have been allowed to ignore this incovenient …
In the last two days Europe’s agreement on the Greek bail-out fund and the larger, related Europe-wide bail out fund have begun to unravel. First the the in-coming, newly elected government of the Slovak republic and their likely President Iveta Radicova re-iterated her conviction that the Slovak Republic should not contribute its share of the …
Between September and November, in the UK and the US, we are going to have the Political Killing Season. We may also have it elsewhere but I haven’t given it enough thought yet. From September onwards the reality of Cuts will start to make itself felt. So far they have not. But when the new …
I think there is a basic asymmetry in US and EU bank debts, which is having an effect on US/Eu relations. EU banks own/are exposed to large losses on bad debts in US real estate. Both residential and commercial. Banks such as Deutsche Bank, Soc Gen and RBS to name just a few obviousl ones. …
So what was last week? Was it the proof that we were just having a little re-trace before powering on with the recovery? Or was it a week of manufactured confidence, created and sustained for the entire week by HFT trades designed to squeeze short sellers and corall sentiment back to the party line? Well …
There are many things wrong with our present political and economic system. We must fix the financial system but we must also, for the first time in a generation, have a coherent and forward looking scientific and industrial research and development strategy. One that is not hangstrung by the petty fogging small mindedness of beaurocratic …
