For those of you who felt perhaps the financial world might have been lying about how they have learned their lesson and reformed their ways – this one is for you. Sometimes you just have to sigh. DETROIT (AP) — General Motors Co. will buy AmeriCredit Corp. for $3.5 billion, a deal that allows the …
The markets waited with baited breath. Bernanke began to speak ….. and the Dow plunged straight down. As soon as he said the words, “remains unusually uncertain”, about the outlook for the US economy, the markets fell over, while the VIX, the measure of volatilty, went the other way. Are we really to believe that …
Today Germany had a failed bond auction. The terms of its failure were simply that not enough people turned up and no one wanted to buy. The rate was customarily low its just no one came to the shop. Why? It was not that the buyers were asking for a higher rate of return to …
Failed German Bond Auction – not what it seems EXPANDED Read More »
A very interesting article and great interview at Portfolio.hu today. What makes it of interest is that for once you have a politician talking out of their mouth instead of the usual other end. The Hungarian government is always described as ‘centre-right’. Forthright might be more accurate. Remember in the wake of the Greek bail-out, …
I thought I’d let you know that a book based upon everything I’ve written starting with Bear Stearns and going up to the Greek fiasco is now finished. It is called The Debt Generation. All we have to do now is find an agent and a publisher. I say we because it has been edited …
The future for a great many countries is already out there. One of the best places to see how it will be is Ireland. A few weeks ago the triumphant headline was ‘Ireland out of recession’. And the articles that went with the headline were full of ‘growth’ and ‘bounce’ and ‘exports’. They were all …
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 …
