You know I may be getting the hang of this. Yesteraday I wrote about the situation in Hungary and Romania following on from the day before worrying about the Balkans in general. And today, guess what? European stock markets all dive because of ‘fears about Hungary’. In Hungary a spokesperson for Hungary’s Prime Minster ,( […]

Everyone tends to see what they are looking for. So those who want a recovery, see signs of growth in the US and see China as still powering ahead. They see the markets having had a salutory ‘correction’, which presages a return to the business of recovery. I see things differently. Now what I look

Just a quick note. I have mentioned many times before my suspicion that there are many more bad debts lying undeclared at the regional and municipal level. I think this is going to start to leak out faster now in Portugal, Spain and Italy. Italy might even be the biggest – They’ve already declared losses

Wall Street was gloating – ‘shrugged off the slump’, was the phrase, I think – then it started to go sideways again. And once again it was those pesky Europeans, who just couldn’t stick with the mindless euphoric trance of See no evil, Hear no evil. So what went wrong, that the Euro started to

China’s GDP is still growing despite the fact that all the markets to which it exports have contracted. Stange no? I think we would do well to better understand China’s growth. Famously China exports to the US. Since ’08 however the US consumer has not been. Consuming that is. At least not at anything like

I can’t help wondering is one of the reasons the markets are feeling a little more confident recently is because they are finally getting their people in to the right jobs. I think there has been a worry in financial cricels that too many ‘off-message’ free thinkers might have crept into positions of financial influence.

What has been the role of the media in this present and extended crisis? What most people, me included, want to believe is that jouranilists are like Woodward and Bernstein – brave seekers after truth. Fearlessly willing to uncover the truths that will hold the powerful accountable. Sadly this is very rarely the case among

Sometimes even when you haven’t seen the stone drop, you know it has because you see the ripples spreading. A few days ago Hypo Real Estate, the massive and utterly bankrupt German Bank bailed by the German tax payer – their version of AIG – had to be given another €10 billion in loan guarentees.

The divergence between bond markets and stock markets is all about what governments are going to do , for whom and when. Neither market, certainly not the stock market, has much to do with the health or otherwise of the companies whose shares and debts are being traded and priced. Two bits of Bond Market

In the post above I listed commoditiy speculation as one of the areas the banks et al might look to, for bubble creation and synthetic profits to ramp their share price, which ramps the markets which gives the illusion of recovery. Well, the Journal of Commerce just published its Industrial Price Commodity Smoothed Price Index.