Tidigare nyheter

The lunatic valuation of the FANGs (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google)
100X+ PE multiples are always and everywhere a deformed artifact of central bank driven Bubble Finance
David Stockman 30 January 2016</p>

The $29 Trillion Corporate Debt Hangover That Could Spark a Recession
The seven-year-old global growth model based on cheap credit from central banks is running out of steam
Bloomberg 28 January 2016

Hysteria over China has become ridiculous
China is recovering but the world is not yet out of the woods.
Capital outflows are dangerous wild card in China's currency drama
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 27 January 2016</p>

China is not a $10 trillion growth miracle with transition challenges;
it is a quasi-totalitarian nation gone mad digging, building, borrowing, spending and speculating
in a magnitude that has no historical parallel.
David Stockman 27 January 2016

Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage
The economic losers are in revolt against the elites
Martin Wolf January 26, 2016

Strong dollar took a $5 billion bite out of Apple’s results
MarketWatch 27 January 2016

"Letting renminbi float is better than tightening controls"
China’s accelerating capital flight. The nervousness has now gone mainstream,
with Japan’s central bank governor publicly advising Beijing to tighten controls on capital outflows.
The FT’s editorial column agrees.
Martin Sandbu, FT Free Lunch 26 January 2016

Since we commonly understand why lowering interest rates stimulates debt and economic growth,
and less commonly understand how QE works, I’d like to explain it.
Ray Dalio, founder and head of hedge fund group Bridgewater, FT 25 January 2015

Free love or genocide? The trouble with Utopias
Ever since Thomas More wrote Utopia 500 years ago,
visionaries from William Morris to Ursula K Le Guin have dreamed of ideal worlds.
Tobias Jones, The Guardian, Sunday 24 January 2016

Draghi, Dennis, Wolodarski och Tomas Fischer
700 Days In No Man’s Land -- Why They Can’t Keep It Up
David Stockman, January 23, 2016

Stephen King: Why monetary stimulus has not done its job
via Rolf Englund blog 2016-01-23

David Stockman On CNBC:
This Is A Dead Cat Bounce—-We’re At Peak Debt Headed For Recession
via Rolf Englund blog 2016-01-23

Dow could fall 5,000 points and still not be ‘cheap’
MarketWatch Jan 21, 2016

A host on bubblevision this afternoon noted that the S&P 500 is now down $2 trillion for the year and
wondered if his panel could explain “what’s happened since January 1st?”
The implication, of course, was that since no new recessions have started that the market’s worst ever start of the year was surely overdone.
David Stockman 20 January 2016

The global financial system has become dangerously unstable and faces an avalanche of bankruptcies that will test social and political stability, a leading monetary theorist has warned.
"The situation is worse than it was in 2007. Our macroeconomic ammunition to fight downturns is essentially all used up,"
said William White, the Swiss-based chairman of the OECD's review committee and former chief economist of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS).
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, in Davos 19 Jan 2016

Dow futures fall more than 300 points as oil, Asia selloff rattle investors
Sara Sjolin, MarketWatch Jan 20, 2016

The bear market in stocks has finally arrived
Michael Sincere, MarketWatch Jan 20, 2016

Soon Comes The Deluge
David Stockman • January 19, 2016

If in 2016 there is no shift from monetary to growth policies, the future envisioned by Profs Summers and Rogoff could prove more likely:
sluggish growth; currency conflicts; and populist politics and fights over distribution — punctuated by mini-crises as struggling economies falter
Robert Zoellick,a former president of the World Bank and US trade representative, FT 18 January 2016

IMF demands debt relief as price for involvement in Greek bail-out
Telegraph 14 January 2016

Germany's Constitutional Court to hear case against ECB bond buying
Todd Buell, MarketWatch, Jan 15, 2016

China Stocks Enter Bear Market as State-Fueled Rally Evaporates
Bloomberg News, January 15, 2016

I was one of the many economists who had barely heard of Hyman Minsky, still less read any of his work, before the financial crisis.
One of the many who, seeking to understand, quickly devoured his Stabilizing an Unstable Economy. And found it pretty sensible.
There didn’t seem to be anything in that book a sensible mainstream macro person should have objected to.
Should being the operative word.
Because of course everyday, mainstream DSGE models in use in 2008 ruled out the very possibility of a crisis,
whereas Minsky believed in their inevitability in some shape.
The Enlightened Economist, 12 January 2016

AMZN and its three other FANG amigos had accounted for a $530 billion gain in market cap
while the other 496 stocks in the S&P 500 had declined by even larger amount.
That is, the apparently flat S&P 500 index of 2015 was hiding an incipient bear—–owing to a market narrowing action like none before.
Compared to the Fabulous FANGs (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google)
David Stockman, January 13, 2016

SocGen: brace for a 2008-style crash and US stocks to fall by 75pc
Notorious "uber bear" Albert Edwards warns that the world is about to "reap the whirlwind" of the US Fed's quantitative easing
Peter Spence, Telegraph Economics Correspondent, 13 January 2016

One person who is particularly bearish is the incomparable Albert Edwards. SocGen’s “uber bear” (or, more appropriately, “realist”)
is out with a particularly alarming assessment of the situation facing markets in the new year.
The Fed?s pursuit of negligently loose monetary policies since 2009 is a misguided attempt to boost economic growth via asset price inflation and we will now reap the whirlwind
zerohedge 13 January 2016

RBS has advised clients to brace for a “cataclysmic year” and a global deflationary crisis,
warning that major stock markets could fall by a fifth and oil may plummet to $16 a barrel.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 11 Jan 2016

One source of comfort is that the retail money, often called the dumb money by Wall Street,
is not all by itself in the wilderness of figuring out this market right now.
“Everyone is the dumb money. Not even the billionaires have any idea what’s going to happen next,”
says Greg Guenthner of the Daily Reckoning blog.
MarketWatch 12 January 2016

China’s forex reserves drop by record $108bn in December
Given that depreciation expectations are now entrenched, analysts say further intervention would slow down,
but not reverse, the weakening trend. Such spending could be wasted if it only delays the inevitable, they say.
FT January 7, 2016

China has since spent tens of billions of its foreign-exchange reserves in an effort to keep the currency from falling
The central issue is the classic dichotomy of the modern Communist Party as it seeks more market oriented policies but retains an inherent distrust of risk
— leading to a reluctance to let markets be the final arbiter of either equity prices or foreign exchange rates.
FT January 6, 2016

It is in this context that we might reflect on the recent announcement of a $512bn fall in currency reserves in 2015.
Since China has a current account and net direct investment surplus of about $600bn,
implied capital outflows must have been close to $1tn.
George Magnus, FT 11 Jsnuary 2016

Heed the fears of the financial markets
Experience suggests that the best indicator of a country’s future economic prospects is the decisions its citizens make about keeping capital at home or exporting it abroad.
The renminbi is under pressure because Chinese citizens are eager to move their money overseas.
Were it not for the substantial recent depletion of China’s reserves, the renminbi would have fallen further
Larry Summers, FT January 10, 2016

You may wonder why we are worrying about defence of the Chinese currency at all when China still has $3.33?trillion of foreign exchange reserves to throw at the problem.
Yet the fact is that the Chinese are burning through their reserves at frightening speed.
Jeremy Warner 9 Jan 2016

Be Scared of China's Debt, Not Its Stocks
Noah Smith, Bloomberg JAN 7, 2016

“Fangs” — Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google
As with the first Shanghai Surprise, the stark reaction to this week’s Chinese events reveals deep lack of confidence in the health of the western corporate sector.
Even if the situation now stabilises — as it did for several months back in 2007 —
the message of concern, in both west and east, is clear.
John Authers, FT 8 January 2016

According to the BLS, the US economy generated a miniscule 11,000 jobs in the month of December.
Yet notwithstanding the fact that almost nobody works outside any more,
the BLS fiction writers added 281,000 to their headline number to cover the “seasonal adjustment.”
This is done on the apparent truism that December is generally colder than November
David Stockman, January 9, 2016

Sweden should try to avoid Swiss mistakes - Will the Riksbank do whatever it takes?
By Martin Sandbu, FT January 6, 2016 via Rolf Englund blog

Investors have become much more concerned that a larger devaluation may be in the works,
either through the choice of the Chinese authorities, or because the outflow of private capital is getting out of hand.
Some bears in the currency markets believe that China could soon be suffering from a genuine exchange rate crisis,
in which its enormous foreign exchange reserves could be quickly drained.
Gavyn Davies, FT 6 January 2016

European stock markets wonder if China might send its plunge protection team their way
David Koehane, FT 8 Jsnuary 2016

One of the (many) fascinating things about this latest global financial crisis is that there’s no single catalyst.
Unlike 2008 when the carnage could be traced back to US subprime housing, or 2000 when tech stocks crashed and pulled down everything else,
this time around a whole bunch of seemingly-unrelated things are unraveling all at once.
zerohedge 7 January 2016

Last month, the Fed lifted interest rates for the first time in nine years, and short-term bond yields have duly climbed higher.
But longer-term Treasury bonds have shrugged, with yields actually falling since the US central bank tightened monetary policy.
Robin Wigglesworth, Financial Times 7 January 2016

ZIRP and QE were terrible mistakes
Rolf Englund blog 4 January 2016

A Year of Sovereign Defaults?
Carmen Reinhart, Project Syndicate 31 December 2015

Den stora paniken 1873, som ledde till den långa depressionen 1873–96.
Waldemar Ingdahl, SvD Understreckare 13 februari 2009

By 2050, There Could Be as Many as 25 Million Poor Elderly Americans
The Atlantic 30 December 2015

“wealth effects” doctrine did not levitate main street prosperity
Whatever savings and investments the middle class baby-boomers have left is about to get monkey-hammered good and hard.
David Stocklman, 29 December 2015

Getting economies "back to normal" was always the hope during that remarkable time when the financial system was in danger of going bust.
I'm not sure anyone thought that, eight years on, we would still be in a near zero interest rate world.
Or, in cases such as the eurozone, a negative interest rate world.
Kamal Ahmed, BBC Business editor, 16 December 2015

A strong eurozone needs a full banking union
Common deposit insurance will reduce the risk of future crises
Financial Times editorial, December 27, 2015

The bailout of Banco Internacional de Funchal (Banif),
a small Madeira-based lender that has blown a big hole in Portugal’s public finances,
has revealed the fragility of the unprecedented leftwing alliance that brought Mr Costa to power
after an inconclusive general election.
Financial Times 27 December 2015

Yanis Varoufakis talks again, insults everybody
The ex-Greek finance minister closes out a difficult year by torching his former Eurogroup colleagues.
www.politico.eu/LAURENS CERULUS 12/24/15

A malign external outcome of China’s unsustainable growth model is that returns in many industries have been depressed
because of the Chinese contribution to global excess capacity.
That is an undermentioned factor in the low levels of investment by industry in the US and much of Europe since the financial crisis.
John Plender, FT 23 December 2015

Grekiska banker skyldiga 1.000 miljarder
Rolf Englund blog 23 december 2015

Germany wants IMF-style conditionality imposed on Greece more or less indefinitely.
But both the Greek government and the staff of the IMF dislike this possibility.
The former hates it because it wants a free hand.
The latter hate it because they fear the conditions for successful programmes do not exist.
This being so, they cannot, in good conscience, recommend one to the board.
Martin Wolf, FT 22 December 2015

The core idea behind secular stagnation was that the neutral real rate had for a variety of reasons fallen and might well be below zero
In more technical economic language, secular stagnation is the hypothesis that the IS curve has shifted back and down so that the real interest rate consistent with full employment has declined.
More straightforwardly, if you see weaker growth despite lower real interest rates that tends to confirm the secular stagnation idea.
Lawrence Summers, FT 22 December 2015

Political uprising in Spain shatters illusion of eurozone recovery
"Our message to Europe is clear. Spain will never again be the periphery of Germany.
We will restore the meaning of sovereignty," said Podemos
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 21 Decenber 2015

Europe’s leaders find solutions that are temporary, barely satisfactory and designed chiefly
to serve the purpose of somehow keeping the EU show on the road.
Like the Holy Roman Empire the EU may not disintegrate but slip into a glacial decline
Tony Barber, Europe Editor and Associate Editor, FT 21 December 2015

The EU did not collapse suddenly like the Roman empire.
Its decline was more like that of the Holy Roman Empire.
Extract from the Oxford History of Modern Europe, published in 2045,
Timothy Garton Ash, FT 18 December 2015

Finland and asymmetric shocks
What’s at stake: Finland exemplifies the difficulty of dealing with asymmetric shocks within a Monetary Union
as the Finnish economy has struggled to recover from a series of idiosyncratic shocks
– the decline of Nokia, the obsolescence of the timber industry, and the fallout of the Russian crisis.
JÉRÉMIE COHEN-SETTON, Bruegel, 21 December 2015

Speech by President Juncker at the European Parliament Plenary session on the Economic and Monetary Union
"This has nothing to do with institutional power grabs or federal dreams."
via Rolf Englund blog 19 december 2015

The U.S. current-account deficit rose 11.7% in the third quarter to the highest level since 2008
The deficit increased to a seasonally adjusted $124.1 billion from a revised $111.1 billion in the second quarter
It’s the biggest gap since the fourth quarter of 2008.
MarketWatch 17 December 2015

Today Will Be a Watershed Moment for Financial Markets
We are in uncharted waters after nearly 20 years of madcap money printing by the Fed and other central banks.
Everything has been wildly inflated — stocks, bonds, real estate — and also the entire real economy as measured by global GDP.
That includes trade volumes, capital spending, commodity prices, energy and mining capacity, manufacturing investment, bulk carriers and containerships.
Also, warehouse and distribution facilities, brick and mortar retail space and much, much more.
David Stockman • December 15, 2015

As every student of recent economic history will know, the first rumble of thunder in the Global Financial Crisis came with the collapse in the summer of 2007 of two large Bear Stearns hedge funds.
Investors demanded their money back, but managers were unable to liquidate their positions fast enough to deliver.
Jeremy Warner, Telegraph 15 December 2015

The argument for an interest-rate rise now is not a compelling one
Just because it seems inevitable does not mean it is a good idea.
FT editorial December 15, 2015

Frozen withdrawals in 2007 and 2015
Rolf Englund blog 2015-12-12

Best books of 2015
Financial Times December 2015

Books of the year 2015
The Economist, December 2015

Finland's depression is the final indictment of Europe's monetary union
Finland has lost a quarter of its industry since 2008 even though it is the poster-child of EMU competitiveness
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 18 Nov 2015

Stefan Ingves och Englunds varningsord
Bostadslån och utlandslån
Rolf Englund blog 19 november 2015

Spain
Greece's creditor powers have delayed talks over reducing the country's debt mountain
for fear of emboldening anti-austerity forces in the southern Mediterranean, its finance minister has claimed.
Telegraph 10 November 2015

US and Europe still live with the legacies of the financial crisis of 2007-09 and the subsequent eurozone crisis.
Could better policies have prevented that outcome; and, if so, what might they have been?
Martin Wolf, FT 10 November 2015

Cervenka Turner:
Det finns smartare sätt att spendera 200 miljarder på.
Varför inte sätta in tjugotusen direkt på varje svensks bankkonto?
Cervenka SvD november 2015

Tove Lifvendahl: Men...
- Visst, det går att göra otaliga och välförtjänta poänger på att det som för ett år sedan hade renderat verbala spöstraff vid samhällsdebattens skampåle,
nu förs fram i strid ström från dem som då villigt hade greppat piskan. Men ...
Rolf Englund blog 6 november 2015

The admission that the euro was a mistake should not be confused with a desire to dissolve it. That would be even more catastrophic.
It is merely a recognition that we are trapped in a dysfunctional monetary system.
Enlargement and the euro are two big mistakes that ruined Europe
Wolfgang Münchau FT 1 November 2015

– It is difficult to read former US Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke’s new memoir, The Courage to Act, as anything other than a tragedy.
It is the story of a man who may have been the best-prepared person in the world for the job he was given, but who soon found himself outmatched by its challenges, quickly falling behind the curve and never quite managing to catch up.
It is to Bernanke’s great credit that the shock of 2007-2008 did not trigger another Great Depression. But...
J. Bradford DeLong, Project Syndicate, 29 October 2015

EU: Det här med ever closer union skall ni inte ta så allvarligt.
Telegraph 28 October via Rolf Englund blog

Hans Bergström: En stats suveränitet förutsätter fysisk kontroll av dess gränser
via Rolf Englund blog

Tove Lifvendahl gör helt om och förespråkar fri invandring. Är det någon som bryr sig?
Rolf Englund blog 25 oktober 2015

Schäuble’s Gathering Storm
The “Schäuble plan,” calls for a limited political union to support the euro.
Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, French Economy Minister Emmanuel Macron
Yanis Varoufakis, Project Syndicate 23 October, 2015

Lunch with Ben Bernanke
I turn, finally, to perhaps the biggest question about the crisis. Could they have avoided the failure of Lehman in September 2008?
“No,” he responds firmly. “It was completely unavoidable. Without a buyer, there was no one to guarantee their liabilities. So no one would lend to them. There was a complete run of all the creditors, all of the counterparties, all of the customers.
And if we had lent them the money and somehow conjured up some fake collateral, in violation of the law, we would have ended up owning the firm, and it would have been a non-viable firm.”
Martin Wolf, FT 23 October 2015

In his new memoir, The Courage to Act, Bernanke sets out an exhaustive account of his actions during his eight years as chairman,
essentially arguing that, had it not been for the interventions the Fed eventually championed, America’s fate would have been incalculably worse.
Financial Times, 11 October 2015

President Silva reappointed Pedro Passos Coelho as prime minister three weeks after his centre-right alliance
(PAF) emerged from a general election as the largest political force but lost its outright majority.
Financial Times 23 October 2015

Portugal has entered dangerous political waters.
For the first time since the creation of Europe’s monetary union, a member state has taken the explicit step of forbidding eurosceptic parties from taking office on the grounds of national interest.
Anibal Cavaco Silva, Portugal’s constitutional president, has refused to appoint a Left-wing coalition government even though it secured an absolute majority in the Portuguese parliament and won a mandate to smash the austerity regime bequeathed by the EU-IMF Troika.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard 23 Oct 2015

Merkel's transformation is telling of the difference between politics that are good and politics that are right. The distinction is as old as political philosophy itself.
German political philosopher Max Weber identified the distinction as being between the ethics of conviction and the ethics of responsibility.
In other words, the difference between politics that are guided only by morals or by the likely consequences policies might produce.
Der Spiegel 21 September 2015

Det finns en stark logik som talar för att trappa av ränteavdraget.
Gamla argument, som hade att göra med fastighetsskatten, gäller inte längre.
DN-ledare 2015-10-19

In all, the massive speculation unleashed in the equity markets since the March 2009 bottom
has caused more than $5 trillion of current cash flow and new debt to be allocated to corporate stock buybacks, M&A deals and LBOs.
The stock market is thus a creature of financial engineering, not a mechanism for efficiently allocating capital and accurately pricing prospective risk and return.
David Stockman, October 20, 2015

What I wish George Will, Bill Gross, and other free market advocates would consider is
the possibility that the Fed itself is not the source of the low rates, but simply is a follower of where market forces have pushed interest rates.
That is, the Great Recession and the prolonged slump that followed caused interest rates to be depressed and the Fed did its best to keep short-term interest rate near this low market-clearing level.
Economists view 20 October 2015

These securities might be the only safe haven left
The yields on some inflation-protected Treasury bonds have doubled since the spring
MarketWatch Oct 19, 2015

EU - en superstat ?
Jag ser inte Romfördragets ord om ”ever closer union” som en vision av en skräckinjagande europeisk superstat
utan bara som ett uttryck av EU-fädernas önskan att undvika att ett tredje världskrig startar i Europa.
Janerik Larsson, SvD 16 oktober 2015

Tove Lifvendahl: Thatcher och Babylons expresståg
Det babyloniska expresståget har dessvärre kört på med hög hastighet.
Margaret Thatcher var en vän av det europeiska samarbetet i termer av att säkra fred och handel,
men hon var inte en vän av socialism, oavsett det kom i nationell eller unionsmässig skepnad.
Tove Lifvendahl, SvD ledarblog 14 oktober 2015

Länderna som upplevt bostadskrascher
SvD Näringsliv listar länderna som har sett sina priser falla på bostadsmarknaden.
Oktober 2015

Investors fear a "black swan" catastrophic event in the financial markets right now more than ever before.
At least according to the CBOE Skew Index. Put simply, traders are buying options that pay off only if the stock market drops a whole lot.
CNBC 13 October 2015

Nu börjar jag bli orolig om bopriserna
”Det finns många exempel där prisökningar som är vettiga i början inte stannar av i tid. Inte minst i Spanien innan finanskrisen.
Nu börjar jag bli orolig att vi kommit in i den fas där utvecklingen inte är vettig och motiverad längre”, säger John Hassler.
Dagens Industri 13 oktober 2015

Solid growth is harder than blowing bubbles
The world economy has lost its last significant credit-fuelled engine of demand - China.
The result is almost certain to be a further boost to the global “savings glut” or, as Lawrence Summers calls it, “secular stagnation” — the tendency for demand to be weak relative to potential supply.
Martin Wolf, FT October 13, 2015

Cui bono?
Policy makers may assist the financial industry once more when the U.S. Federal Reserve begins tightening monetary policy.
Bloomberg 12 October 2015

IMF could now see its involvement when its Greek programme ends in March 2016.
In debt sustainability analysis carried out by body, it has suggested Greece may need a full moratorium on payments for 30 years to finally end its reliance on international rescues.
Telegraph 1 October 2015

This Is The Endgame, According To Deutsche Bank
We think the end game is that when the next global recession hits, then QE/zero rate world will be re-appraised.
Perhaps the G20 will get together and decide to try a different approach.
In our 2013 long-term study we speculated how we thought the end game was 'helicopter money'
- ie money printing to finance economic objectives (tax cuts, infrastructure etc).
zerohedge 1 October 2015

The benefits of migration are questionable
Cosmopolitanism is incompatible with our organisation into territorial jurisdictions
Martin Wolf, FT September 29, 2015

The Great Yield Divergence
When a former Bank of England deputy governor gives a presentation entitled "Are Low Interest Rates Natural?" to a extraordinarily high-powered audience of academics and monetary policymakers, you can bet he will come up with some great charts.
Charlie Bean's historical analysis of long-term real and nominal yields in the UK is amazing: 300 years of UK nominal and real long-term yields
Coppoloa Comment 27 September 2015

Helicopter Money And The Comeback Of Gold
– central bankers have taken it upon themselves to sponsor great bull markets in the hopes of making people spend more because they will feel richer.
That was the theory.
James Grant, September 26, 2015

The Return of the Original Phillips curve?
Why Lars E O Svensson’s Critiq ue of the Riksbank’s Inflation Targeting is Misleading
Fredrik Andersson and Lars Jonung, June 2015

Soros:
Europe now faces at least five crises at the same time,
Ukraine Losing it would cause irreparable harm: it could create a failed state of more than 40 million people
The New York Review of Books 8 October 2015

Some people never learn. They follow the same path that destroyed their finances in the past.
Wall Street is desperately packaging the increasing amounts of subprime slime in new derivatives of mass destruction and peddling them to clients, while shorting those same derivatives.
It’s called the Goldman Sachs method. When home prices begin to tumble, these derivatives will self-destruct again.
What is happening today is nothing more than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
zerohedge 25 September 2015

Romer och andra Schengeninnevånare får vara här tre månader.
Men hur vet vi när dom kom hit om vi inte har passkontroll vid gränsen?
Och att inte ha passkontroll vid gränserna Schengenländerna emellan är själva grundbulten i Schengenöverenskommelsen.
Rolf Englund 26 september 2015

China in the Debt-Deflation Trap
In 1933, Irving Fisher was the first to identify the dangers of over-indebtedness and deflation
Andrew Sheng and Xiao Geng
Project Syndicate 24 September 2015

"We are at a sharp inflexion point," says Charles Goodhart, a professor at the London School of Economics and a former top official at the Bank of England.
As cheap labour dries up and savings fall, real interest rates will climb from sub-zero levels back to their historic norm of 2.75pc to 3pc, or even higher.
The implications are ominous for long-term US Treasuries, Gilts or Bunds. The whole structure of the global bond market is a based on false anthropology.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 23 September 2015

Why the Fed Buried Monetarism
Friedman’s “natural” rate was replaced with the less value-laden and more erudite-sounding “non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment” (NAIRU).
Central bankers now seem to be implicitly (and perhaps even unconsciously) returning to pre-monetarist views:
tradeoffs between inflation and unemployment are real and can last for many years.
Anatole Kaletsky; Project Syndicate, 22 September 2015

Bank resolution will become more complicated after January 1, when new eurozone rules will force depositors to face the costs of rescue programmes.
Under the EU’s Bank Recovery and Resolution Directive (BRRD),
shareholders and depositors will have to take a hit worth 8pc of their total liabilities before lenders receive official sector aid.
Telegraph 19 Sep 2015

A great critique of Rational Expectations
Charles Manski paper in 2004 in Econometrica looking at the way economists measure expectations.
Noah Smith. August 22, 2015

It's time to shatter the myths of the Battle of Britain
'The Few' were immensely courageous, but the image of plucky Little Britain, David against the Goliath of Nazi Germany, is completely misleading
While individual squadrons were often sent to attack much larger formations, collectively they were not always so hopelessly outnumbered.
On September 15 1940, for example, the morning raid of some 75 Luftwaffe aircraft were attacked by around 275 British fighters,
while the afternoon raid of 300-plus enemy aircraft was met by 330 Spitfires and Hurricanes.
James Holland, Telegraph 15 September 2015

Conundrum Redux
The "conundrum" was that Greenspan couldn't control long term rates as he wished.
Long rates do not always track short rates or Fed pronouncements.
The Grumpy Economist, John Cochrane's blog, September 15, 2015

Hillary, Jeb och Lehman Brothers
In the US big donors in the presidential campaign — folks who might be expected to remember the turmoil of 2008 — are behaving as if the Lehman bankruptcy didn’t happen at all.
Republican money has flooded to Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor who was serving as a highly paid adviser to Lehman at the very moment that it failed.
Gary Silverman, FT September 18, 2015

Det finska eländet är gåtfullt.
Tillväxten har varit noll sedan finanskrisen bröt ut, och statsskulden stiger.
Även om det inte var euron som knäckte landets mobiltelefonjätte har valutan sannolikt blivit ett hinder för omställningen.
En lägre växelkurs skulle ha kunnat gynna tillväxten i nya branscher.
DN-ledare 17 september 2015

It would be heartwarming to believe that the crowds that turned out to welcome Syrian refugees arriving at Munich station
show that Europe will respect its commitments in full. It would also be dangerously naive.
Gideon Rachman, FT September 7, 2015

Finland har varit eurozonens främsta åtstramningspolis under valutaområdets utdragna kris.
Nu har Finland självt hamnat i ekonomiskt ryggläge och behöver draghjälp i form av en svagare valuta eller annan efterfrågestimulans.
Nu får man hålla tillgodo med självsvältskur.
Per Lindvall SvD Näringsliv 13 september 2015

Battle of Britain: Historic flypast for 75th anniversary
BBC 15 September 2015
Highly Recommended

Economics is not the kind of science in which there could ever be one true model that works best in all contexts.
The point is not “to reach a consensus about which model is right,” as Romer puts it, but to figure out which model applies best in a given setting.
And doing that will always remain a craft, not a science, especially when the choice has to be made in real time.
Dani Rodrik, Project Syndicate SEP 10, 2015

By invoking EU law to impose quotas under pain of sanctions, Brussels has unwisely brought home the reality that
states have given up sovereignty over their borders, police and judicial systems, just as they gave up economic sovereignty by joining the euro.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 9 Sep 2015

Dagens penningpolitik med minusränta riskerar att dra ner Sverige i en ny finanskris.
Att finjustera prisökningar till 2 procent, som är målet, är omöjligt, menar han och förordar ett mer flexibelt mål.
Lars Jonung DN 10 september 2015

The case for keeping US interest rates low
After nearly seven years of zero interest rates, the inflation of which critics warned is invisible
Martin Wolf, FT September 8, 2015

Hayek Versus Keynes
During World War Two, John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek spent all night together, alone, on the roof of the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge.
“It was, perhaps, the most unusual episode in the long running duel between the two giants of twentieth century economic thought.
John Mauldin, 3 September 2015

Father of the euro fears EU superstate by the back door
Professor Otmar Issing has warned against handing over control of tax and spending before a democratic political union has been established
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Cernobbio, Italy, 6 September 2015

- There is no such thing as rational expectations.
There is wishful thinking, or panic.
Now in a chart.
Rolf Englund blog 7 september 2015

Finanskrisen avslöjade obarmhärtigt bristerna i eurons konstruktion. Medlemsländerna var för olika
För federalisten är allt okomplicerat. Lösningen heter finanspolitisk union, en enda budget bestämd av ett departement i Bryssel
En sådan är fullständigt otänkbar för Tyskland
För Sveriges del skulle euron vara för evigt omöjlig.
DN huvudledare 4 september 2015

Problemets kärna är att det inte går att ha EMU om man inte vill ha ett Federalt Europa,
styrt från Bryssel och Frankfurt, eller om det blir Berlin.
Rolf Englund, Nya Wermlands-Tidningen, 11 juni 2001

Alarming news?
The Mebane Faber model based simply on comparing current stock prices to their moving average for the past 10 months.
MarketWatch 3 September 2015

The Greenspan conundrum in reverse
Reserve selling means yields rise more than Fed expects
James Mackintosh, FT 2 September 2015

The head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. says banks have responded to low margins by extending long-term assets more than long-term liabilities,
setting the stage for vulnerability if interest rates were to grow.
MarketWatch 2 September 2015

Relative to US levels, China’s GDP per head is where South Korea’s was in the mid-1980s.
South Korea’s real GDP per head has since nearly quadrupled in real terms, to reach almost 70 per cent of US levels.
Martin Wolf, Financial Times September 1, 2015

Scientist have long sought something called a universal flu vaccine, which some have even described as the "holy grail" of influenza vaccination.
This is a vaccine that is created once, and which protects for many years—or even a lifetime—against all manner of flu viruses.
Now two groups of scientists in America say they have made an important step towards creating just such a universal vaccine.
The Economist 25 August 2015

John Hussman
Här är en som varnar för börskraschen mer än jag
Rolf Englund 2015-08-31

Docenten Claes Hägg spräckte tidernas bubbla i maj 1990
DI 2015-08-14

Spain’s recovery has been helped hugely by external factors outside Mr Rajoy’s control.
A weaker euro has helped to boost the growth in Spanish exports.
The decline in oil prices has been particularly beneficial for a country which imports all its energy needs from abroad.
The European Central Bank’s adoption of quantitative easing has been a further boost.
Financial Times editorial, 25 August 2015

Det är EU-kommissionens sammanvägda index för flyttskatt, fastighetsskatt och ränteavdrag som visar
att Sverige, tillsammans med Nederländerna, är mest generöst av alla med skattefördelar till dem som äger sina bostäder.
SvT 26 augusti 2015

Arguably the most consequential question about today’s economic situation
— though one not asked with anywhere near enough urgency —
is why capital investment is not responding more forcefully to interest rates that in some places are at their lowest level in recorded history.
Martin Sandbu, FT Free Lunch, 26 August 2015

Recent events must be seen in the context of a deeper concern.
If they can, the economy will also sustain growth of 6-7 per cent.
If they cannot, economic and political instability threatens.
Martin Wolf, FT 25 August 2015

Andreas Cervenka om Stephen Williamson och Hayek
Världsekonomins medicin sedan 2008 fungerar inte
Augusti 2015

Keep an eye on Austria, with an increasingly unstable banking system,
and the Netherlands, with slow growth and a massively over-indebted household sector.
Don’t assume that Germany can sail through this crash unscathed either. Its economy has been driven by exports to China, worth $100bn a year.
If China slows down dramatically, we may well find that the German economy is a lot weaker than we thought.
Matthew Lynn, Telegraph 24 Aug 2015

Unpredictable does not mean unexplainable
Free Lunch is sceptical of anyone’s ability to “explain” financial market reversals.
Martin Sandbu, FT 24 August 2015

Accommodative monetary policy was supposed to spur investment in productive activities
Last week’s renminbi devaluation brought into focus that since 2010,
China’s export-driven economy has laboured under a 25 per cent appreciation of its real effective exchange rate.
Avinash Persaud, FT August 24, 2015

Things got so bad that former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers took to Twitter to
compare the day’s events to previous meltdowns and say, “we could be in the early stage of a very serious situation.”
Bloomberg 25 August 2015

Det går inte att ha en valuta, en centralmakt och 19 finansdepartement som gör som de vill.
Och det går inte att ha en valuta som används av 340 miljoner medborgare som tillsammans utgör världens största ekonomi
utan en enhetlig politisk och ekonomisk styrning.
Statslösa valutor överlever inte.
Ledare DI PM Nilsson 23 augusti 2015

Jag var en millimeter ifrån att rösta nej till EU i folkomröstningen hösten 1994
Jakampanjen hade varit hemsk. Den låtsades som om frågan gällde ett frihandelsområde
jag höll på att spy när jag på valdagens kväll såg de hånflinande fånarna fira segern på Södra Latin i Stockholm.
PM Nilsson, Expressen 24/8 2003

Debt Is Good
Paul Krugman, 21 August 2015

Rational expectations
Romer roots the sorry state of academic macroeconomics in a battle between Robert Lucas and Thomas Sargent
Martin Sandbu, FT 17 Augusti 2015

Banks
John Kay’s new book, “Other People’s Money”, does the job;
it should be read by everyone concerned with preventing the next crisis.
The Economist 22 August 2015

Turbulence in financial markets gathered momentum amid intensifying concern over slowing global growth,
pushing the Dow Jones Industrial Average into a correction and giving other stock gauges their worse losses since 2011.
21 August 2015

Unworkable and unreformable, the euro surely cannot survive another serious downturn
The euro in its present form will die not of the financial traumas that first threatened its existence, but of popular anger
Jeremy Warner, Telegraph 18 August 2015

Speaking after a six-hour meeting of eurozone finance ministers in Brussels, Christine Lagarde, the IMF managing director, said:
“I remain firmly of the view that Greece’s debt has become unsustainable and that
Greece cannot restore debt sustainability solely through actions on its own.”
FT 14 August 2015

Why China currency moves may spell end of Greenspan ‘conundrum’
MarketWatch Aug 18, 2015

Svenska hushåll fortsätter att låna till sin bostad. Den senaste tolvmånadersperioden ökade bostadslånen med 7,4 procent.
Samtidigt ökar andelen som väljer lån med rörlig ränta.
Idag uppgår den till 62,3 procent av den totala lånestocken, vilket är rekord. Aldrig tidigare har andelen varit så hög.
SvD Näringsliv 18 augusti 2015

Krav på amortering bör genomföras snarast,
Finansinspektionen, Riksbanken och Riksgälden DN Debatt 17 augusti 2015

Greece Extend and Pretend again "Elementary, My Dear Watson!"
Rolf Englund blog 2015-08-17

Greece Extend and Pretend
Rolf Englund blog 2015-08-16

The modern financial animal is wont to assume that he or she lives in an age of science. Just peruse the economic research that the great central banks produce.
Even the titles of the papers are incomprehensible. The truth is we live in an age of pseudoscience.
James Grant, FT July 20, 2015

Juncker: Greece is and will irreversibly remain a member of the euro area
BBC, August 14, 2015

I många år har debatten på området handlat om centralbankernas beteende:
bör de försöka hålla tillbaka bubblor och dämpa marknadskurser som äventyrar den finansiella stabiliteten,
eller bara städa upp när bubblorna har brustit?
Barry Eichengreen, DN 2015-08-14

IMF: Lagarde Greece
The fund’s managing director hopes its stance on debt relief will be implemented
FT August 13, 2015
Highly Recommended

Spaniens ekonomi skördar nu frukterna av ekonomiska reformer men det kvarstår ihållande strukturella problem, som "mycket hög" arbetslöshet, låg produktivitet och höga skuldnivåer.
Det skriver IMF i en Spanienrapport
SvD Näringsliv 14 augusti 2015 och länk till IMF

Lord Skidelsky said that Keynes would have found two things upsetting.
First, he would be frustrated with the lack of precautions taken to prevent a huge financial crash like the one we saw in 2008.
Secondly, Lord Skidelsky believes Keynes wouldn't be happy with the policy measures taken after the crash. Keynes would have wanted a more "buoyant response," he said.
Specifically, he doesn't think Keynes would have liked the Federal Reserve's quantitative easing
BloombergTV, 13 August 2015

Riksbanken förlorar på sjunkande guldpris.
Tomas Fischer kritiserade redan 2007
Rolf Englund blog 13 augusti 2015

The lesson from Asia and Latin America in the 1990s was that currency pegs reinforced and indeed exacerbated financial cycles.
Asset prices tended to overshoot on the upside, creating macro imbalances that were eventually corrected through catastrophic devaluations.
FT 13 August 2015

Portugal is the EU country hit hardest by a Europe-wide demographic problem
as falling fertility rates and ageing populations threaten economic growth and the provision of pension, public health and elderly care services.
FT 12 August 2015

Greece could struggle to win German support for its third bailout programme after
IMF confirmed last night that it was not yet prepared to put any cash into the deal.
The Times, August 12 2015

Varoufakis:
"The International Monetary Fund... is throwing up its hands collectively despairing at a programme that is simply founded on unsustainable debt...
and yet this is a programme that everybody is working towards implementing."
He added: "Ask anyone who knows anything about Greece's finances and they will tell you this deal is not going to work,"
BBC 12 August 2015

The global population is growing steadily.
The UN’s medium-variant projection shows a rise to 9.7bn people in 2050 and 11.2bn by 2100.
Robin Harding, FT August 11, 2015

One of the things that occurred to me is the consequence of the 2008 crisis.
I knew something was brewing, but I missed the actual date as frankly did everybody else.
Alan Greenspan, Telegraph 10 August 2015

Fiscal and economic union, at least for the eurozone.
Constanze Stelzenmüller, FT August 10, 2015

Throughout this extraordinary monetary experiment managers of listed companies have been reluctant to invest in fixed assets
despite enjoying the lowest borrowing costs in history.
By contrast financial institutions have been fearless in propelling markets ever higher.
John Plender, FT 6 august 2015

Syntesen av Hayek, Friedman och Keynes,
mitt storhetsvansinniga och föga framgångsrika projekt
Rolf Englund 7 augusti 2015

Explainer: Puerto Rico’s debt problems
FT June 29, 2015

Though most Austrians on the Internet spend their time flogging gold, hyperventilating about inflation and calling various people communists,
the original "Austrian school" thinkers -- Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek -- had some other ideas as well.
And some of these might be useful for thinking about China.
Noah Smith, Bloomberg 5 August 2015

Debt relief from its European creditors
Talks over an €86bn bail-out for Greece have been thrown into turmoil after just four days as the International Monetary Fund said
it would have no involvement in the country until it receives explicit assurances over debt sustainability.
Telegraph 30 July 2015

Earth’s Most Famous Climate Scientist Issues Bombshell Sea Level Warning
sea level rise of at least 10 feet /3.04800 meters/ in as little as 50 years
Slate 20 July 2015

Italy’s finance minister calls for ‘political union’ to save euro
FT July 26, 2015 3:55 pm

Italy’s finance minister calls for ‘political union’ to save euro
Detta är ett led i den stora konspirationen.
Rolf Englund blog 27 juli 2015

Who could have foreseen the huge problems the euro would eventually cause?
Actually, lots of people., /but not Jonung/
Paul Krugman 20 July 2015

The slow march away from Rational Expectations continues.
Recently more and more people are challenging this most powerful of all ideas in modern macro.
Noahpinion, July 24, 2015

Lagarde Push for Greece Debt Relief Challenges Merkel
IMF, which requires borrowers to have sustainable debt, has made clear it won’t ask its 187 other member nations to approve a deal
until euro-area states significantly ease terms on existing loans.
Bloomberg 23 July 2015

Eurozone is happy to back Berlin when it is wrong and resist it when it is right
Bill Emmott, a former editor of The Economist, FT July 21, 2015

John Plender on Bubbles
For unreconstructed efficient market theorists, bubbles do not exist.
John Plender, FT 21 July 2015

Bernanke Isn’t Serious
His latest on Greece and the euro suggests that the deeper problems lie not in Greek fecklessness
but in the refusal of the core — basically Germany — to allow either monetary or fiscal policies that would offset the downdraft from austerity in the periphery.
He even questions the sacred status of “structural reform”
Paul Krugman 17 July 2015

When the French finance minister Mr Sapin arrived in Brussels at midday, he received a shock:
Wolfgang Schäuble, the German finance minister, was armed with a one-page paper advocating
a Greek “timeout from the eurozone” for “at least the next five years”
if Athens did not accept the bloc’s exacting conditions for a new bailout.
FT 17 July 2015

Martin Wolf:
There are no /Greek/ government deficits to finance consumption (or almost none).
So money would be used to pay interest and amounts due
Rolf Englund blog 9 July 2015

Om man ger ett treårigt lån till Grekland på t ex 100 miljarder euro,
skall man då bli förvånad om Grekland efter tre år kommer tillbaka och vill låna 100 miljarder igen
så att de kan lösa det förfallande lånet?
Rolf Englund blog 9 juli 2015

The most recent example of the IMF’s interventionism with regard to nations and their debts came with last week’s provocatively-timed conclusion that Greece’s sovereign debts were unsustainable.
European creditors such as Germany, the IMF warned, had to accept that, despite their discomfort at the idea,
those debts would have to be restructured for Greece to survive as a member of the eurozone.
FT GLOBAL INSIGHT July 7, 2015

Euron förvärrar den grekiska krisen
SvD-ledare signerad Ivar Arpi, 6 juli 2015

So why don't we have a major crisis in Turkey and why is Turkey not on the brink of default when neighboring Greece is?
The answer is simple - It's the exchange rate exchange rate regime stupid!
The Market monetarist, 7 July 2015

ELA explainer: How the emergency liquidity programme works
FT 6 July 2015

At the end of the day, the central issue behind the Greek crisis hasn’t changed: it is still, ultimately, a question of who, picks up the bill.
If everyone avoids their share, the result is unfortunate.
If, as with Germany in 1990, everyone accepts their share, the result is tranquillity.
Germans, however, wanted to be reunited. It is still far from obvious that the nations of Europe feel the same way about each other.
Stephen King, HSBC’s Chief Global Economist and author of When the Money Runs Out, FT 6 July 2015

Om greker flyttar sina pengar från grekiska till tyska banker, stiger då Greklands skulder?
Rolf Englund blog 2015-07-06

Därför avgår Varoufakis
Rolf Englund blog 2015-07-06

IMF admits: we failed to realise the damage austerity would do to Greece
Guardian, 5 June 2015

Greece needs €60bn in new aid, says IMF
Financaial Times 2 Juky 2015

Monetary policymakers have run out of room to fight the next crisis
with interest rates unable to go lower, the BIS warns
Telegraph 28 June 2015

Opinion: Forget Greece, Portugal is the eurozone’s next crisis
The elections later this year may well trigger the second Portuguese crisis
— and that will reveal how the problems in Europe involve far more than just Greece.
MarketWatch June 24, 2015

If euro enthusiasts feel sorry, they might say so
For all the advantages to be eked out of an apology, the most pressing case for it is moral
In politics, unlike business, there is no prize for being right.
Nor is there any punishment for being wrong.
Britain’s pro-Europeans have undergone no reckoning with the recent past.
They offer no account of their previous support for the euro.
Financial Times 22 June 2015

Dear Mr Tsipras,
You should not be reluctant to leave the euro.
Even if you somehow manage to cobble together a deal with the creditors, this would not solve your country’s crisis.
Roger Bootle 21 June 2015

Target 2
As of the end of April, net liabilities related to the allocation of euro banknotes were €16.2bn
and the Target 2 balance was negative by about €99bn.
Therefore, the total exposure of the Eurosystem to Greece was around €115bn.
zerohedge 20 June 2015

The euro was doomed from the start
The creation of the euro has been an error of historic dimensions and done great harm to the EU
which in its first 40 years had brought economic prosperity to the citizens of the Continent.
I had the privilege of negotiating Britain’s opt-out from the then new European single currency in 1991.
Norman Lamont, Telegraph 20 June 2015

Banks are Not Intermediaries of Loanable Funds – and Why This Matters
Yves Smith, June 19, 2015

The spectacle is astonishing.
The European Central Bank, the EMU bail-out fund, and the International Monetary Fund, among others,
are lashing out in fury against an elected government that refuses to do what it is told.
They entirely duck their own responsibility for five years of policy blunders that have led to this impasse.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard 19 June 2015

The fear of default is rapidly being overtaken by a separate
— and possibly more dangerous — ticking time bomb: the solvency of Greece’s banks.
ECB’s own rules may soon prevent it from extending further help, paving the way for a Greek exit from the eurozone.
FT 19 June 2015

The International Monetary Fund’s chief economist, Olivier Blanchard, recently asked a simple and important question:
“How much of an adjustment has to be made by Greece, how much has to be made by its official creditors?”
But that raises two more questions: How much of an adjustment has Greece already made? And have its creditors given anything at all?
James K. Galbraith, the author of The End of Normal, Project Syndicate 16 June 2015

European Court of Justice ruled that ECB’s plan to buy government bonds in potentially unlimited quantities was legal.
FT 16 June 2015

Greece has nothing to lose by saying no to creditors
If it were to default on its official-sector debt, France and Germany stand to forfeit €160bn
Wolfgang Münchau, FT June 14, 2015

Most people also understand that the Greek debate is not just about Greece but also about whether or not several other countries
— Spain, Portugal and Italy among them, and perhaps even France — will also have to restructure their debts with partial debt forgiveness.
What few people realize, however, is these countries have effectively already done so once.
Michael Pettis February 25, 2015

Is Deutsche Bank The Next Lehman?
Deutsche Bank is sitting on more than $75 Trillion in derivatives bets
— an amount that is twenty times greater than German GDP.
Tyler Durden, zerohedge 13 June 2015

It is Europe, as much as Greece, which is opposing a settlement
IMF in an awkward position, because its doubts on the sustainability of Greece's debts cut two ways.
Either Greece, burdened with massive unemployment, would have to raise taxes and cut public spending further;
or some of its debt would have to be written down.
Bloomberg editorial, 12 June 2015

Royal Bank of Scotland
RBS was bailed out by the government. The valuation was about double that of later, comparable American bailouts.
Much of this money was gobbled up by junior bondholders and other creditors, who in any normal insolvency would have lost their shirts.
The debt leverage that sustained a £2.2 trillion balance sheet – at that time the biggest in the world – is a thing of the past.
Jeremy Warner, Telegraph 11 June 2015

IMF is also frustrated that the European side has been unwilling to address the issue of Greece’s debt pile seriously.
According to the IMF’s calculations, putting the Greek economy on a sustainable path now requires
— at the very least — an extension of the maturities on Greece’s outstanding debts.
But European officials, wary of public opinion, have been reluctant to discuss even that.
FT June 11, 2015

IMF åker hem därför att de är missnöjda med EU?
Rolf Englund blog 11 June 2015

Despite doing (basically) everything right, Spain’s membership in the euro has left it at the mercy of
forces far stronger than anything even the most competent and responsible national institutions can handle.
Matthew C Klein. FT Alphaville June 11, 2015

Meredith Whitney shuts her hedge fund
Ms. Whitney first gained star status in October 2007, when as a little-known research analyst at Oppenheimer & Co.
she made a well-timed bearish prediction on Citigroup
The bank’s stock tumbled days later and then-Chief Executive Charles Prince swiftly resigned.
MarketWatch June 11, 2015

Saying no would be to plunge a whole financial system into chaos
The ECB reportedly provided extra liquidity to the Greek economy on Wednesday
upped its emergency liquidity assistance (ELA) from €80.7bn to €83bn,
a move that could keep the domestic economy afloat as Greeks continue to pull their cash from the country.
Telegraph 10 June 2015

I vastly overestimated the risk of /Euro/ breakup, because I got the political economy wrong
— I did not realize just how willing euro elites would be to impose vast suffering in the name of staying in.
Relatedly, I didn’t realize how easy it would be to spin a modest upturn after years of horror as success.
Paul Krugman, NYT 10 June 2015

The U.S. agency that monitors risks in the financial sector in the wake of the Great Recession
doesn’t yet understand why there have been an increasing number of sharp selloffs in U.S. and European bond markets,
the head of the organization said Monday.
MarketWatch 8 June 2015

If Europe cannot bend it will break
Germany’s tough approach is based on a realistic assessment of how hard it will be to get reforms through a 28-member EU
— as well as a profound aversion to rolling back the process of EU integration.
But it is also an alarming commentary on Europe’s inability to respond to changed circumstances, whether it is a 25 per cent shrinkage in the Greek economy,
or the unanticipated migration of millions of people across the EU.
Gideon Rachman, FT 8 June 2015

Rethinking Inflation Targeting
Central banks routinely deny responsibility for any prices other than consumer prices,
ignoring that the value of money is reflected in all prices, including commodities, real estate, stocks, bonds,
and, perhaps most important, exchange rates.
Axel Weber, former president of the Deutsche Bundesbank and a former member of the Governing Council of the ECB, Chairman of UBS Group
Project Syndicate, 8 June 2015

The recent selloff wiped out about $1.2 trillion in value from the global bond market
And holders of debt globally are more exposed to the potential for big losses than at any time in history,
based on a metric known as duration.
Bloomberg 8 June 2015

Bildt, Mona, Ingvar Carlsson och krisen i Grekland
Rolf Englund blog 7 juni 2015

Greek Banks On Verge Of Total Collapse:
Bank Run Surges "Massively" As Depositors Yank €700 Million Today Alone
Tyler Durden, zerohedge, 5 June 2015

Att på den gemensamma marknadens grund bygga en fullt fungerande ekonomisk och monetär union
har visat sig svårare än vad många insett
Carl Bildt, DN Debatt 23 juli 2012

Själv röstade jag ”ja” till att Sverige skulle gå med i valutaunionen vid folkomröstningen 2003
Jag har svårt att tro på idén om en långtgående centralisering av finanspolitiken
Alternativet är en partiell eller total upplösning av valutaunionen
jag tvivlar på att befolkningen i länder med statsfinansiella problem kommer att acceptera förmynderi och bestraffning beslutade av politiker i andra länder
Assar Lindbeck, DN Debatt 17 juli 2012

Germany and Greece’s other creditors continue to demand that Greece sign on to a program
that has proven to be a failure, and that few economists ever thought could, would, or should be implemented.
Joseph Stiglitz, Project Syndicate 5 June 2015

Greek PM Alexis Tsipras: "We do not need an agreement. We need a solution"
BBC 5 June 2015

IMF has betrayed its mission in Greece, captive to EMU creditors
The IMF’s Original Sin in Greece was to let Dominique Strauss-Kahn hijack the institution
to save Europe's banks and the euro when the crisis erupted, dooming Greece to disaster.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 5 June 2015

Är IMFs Lagarde för EU-lydig?
Rolf Englund blog tidigare på dagen 5 juni 2015

Romer: a new trend in economics is polluting the discipline, names Robert Lucas
UNDERCOVER ECONOMIST Tim Harford, FT June 5, 2015

Krugman: That 1914 Feeling - Europe seems to be sleepwalking
A forced Greek exit from the euro would create huge economic and political risks, yet Europe seems to be sleepwalking toward that outcome.
Paul Krugman, 1 June 2015

Tyskland och Frankrike sida vid sida för Ever Closer Union:
For the EU to survive, eurozone countries need to integrate further and create a joint treasury
The euro was built on a Franco-German understanding but overlooked critical flaws in the architecture of monetary union
Finansministrarna Emmanuel Macron and Sigmar Gabriel, Guardian 3 juni 2015

Problemets kärna är att det inte går att ha EMU om man inte vill ha ett Federalt Europa, styrt från Bryssel och Frankfurt, eller om det blir Berlin.
Rolf Englund, Nya Wermlands-Tidningen, 11 juni 2001

The IMF remains sceptical about Greece’s ability to meet the ambitious budget surplus targets
and continues to seek assurances that eurozone governments would agree to restructure Greek debt
— mostly now held by EU creditors — if a credible reform programme is not implemented.
FT 2 June 2015

Will the ECB play its trump card over Greece's future?
So if the ECB's governing council took the view that the Greek banks were not solvent
it would have to tell the Bank of Greece to pull the plug.
Would they?
BBC 2 June 2015

It’s time for Greece to put itself out of its misery.
It must stop hoping for a miracle, default on its debts and exit the euro.
Allister Heath, Telegraph 1 June 2015

Goldman Sachs Asked Two of the World's Best-Known Economists If U.S. Stocks Are in a Bubble
It's Shiller vs. Siegel in the battle over equity market valuations
Bloomberg 1 June 2015

behavioral economics
The threat was that of a paradigm shift. This term, coined by philosopher Thomas Kuhn, refers to the dread moment
when scientists learn that up is down, black is white and everything they thought they understood about the world is wrong.
Noah Smith Bloomberg 1 June 2015

The top-level huddle lasted past midnight Tuesday morning at Germany’s government headquarters with Chancellor Angela Merkel,
IMF chief Christine Lagarde, European Central Bank President Mario Draghi, French President Francois Hollande and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker in attendance.
The goal was to hammer out an offer that Greece could consider in coming days.
Reports

The Case of the Missing Minsky
Bagehot, Keynes, Gavyn Davis, Mark Thoma
Paul Krugman, NYT, 1 June 2015

A First-Hand Account Of The Greek Bank Run
by Tom Winnifrith of Share Prophets, via zerohedge

Peter Wolodarski: Europa behöver migranterna
DN 31 maj 2015

Deposit outflows from Greek banks accelerated this week,
with about €800m withdrawn on Wednesday and Thursday alone
FT 29 May 2015

Bubbla i Shanghai?
Click

Alex Stubb, the current prime minister, will be finance minister
in the three-party coalition that is seeking €6bn of additional cuts by 2021.
Finland is mired in a recession that has lasted for much of the past three years.
FT 27 May 2015

Ingen fara, fattas bara
The European Central Bank Wednesday left the level of emergency cash available to Greek banks unchanged from a week ago at 80.2 billion euros /743 miljarder SEK
Greek lenders still have a liquidity buffer of about 3 billion euros
Bloomberg onsdag 27 maj 2015

Mohamed A. El-Erian:
A significant amount of potentially unpayable Greek debt has been transferred from private creditors
to public balance sheets underpinned by European taxpayers.
via Rolf Englund blog 25 maj 2015

I dag kan vi konstatera att Krugman haft fel inte bara om Baltikum, Grekland, Sverige och USA utan också om Storbritannien.
Märkligt nog har han fått stöd av den traditionellt konservativa internationella valutafonden som borde ha vetat bättre men nu får dela skammen med Krugman.
Anders Åslund, SvD 24 maj 2015

Per Schlingmann, en av ”arbetslinjens” arkitekter, dödförklarar nu det begrepp som kanske mer än något annat präglat svensk politik under de senaste tio åren.
Den nya tidens Gud stavas Globalisering, Urbanisering och Digitalisering.
Förändringarna är så omfattande att vi kan tala om att vi befinner oss i ett nytt paradigm.
Per Schlingmann, DN 2015-05-11

“The decision to use the single currency to drive the European project forward was a risky one,
and at some stage or probably in several stages, it will be necessary to put the missing fiscal framework into place,”
Stanley Fischer, the vice-chairman of the Fed, FT 21 May 2015

As Greece approaches the mathematical limit of its entitlements under the ELA program,
the ECB may find itself in the untenable position of acting as judge, jury and executioner.
Mark Gilbert, Bloomberg 19 May 2015

Subsidies that make borrowing irresistible need to be phased out
Half the rich world’s governments allow their citizens to deduct the interest payments on mortgages from their taxable income
The Economist May 16th 2015 print

The eurozone countries must accept some economic truths
— all expressed accurately, albeit not diplomatically — by Yanis Varoufakis, Greek finance minister.
Wolfgang Münchau, FT 17 May 2015

Riksbankens mål om 2,0 procents inflation tillkom i all hast för litet mer än 20 år sedan
Inflationsmålet skulle inte ha funnits där, om Sverige hade klarat att hålla fast växelkurs.
Johan Schück, DN 2015-05-08

AND THE WEAK SUFFER WHAT THEY MUST?
Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future
YANIS VAROUFAKIS

Greece's onerous obligations to the IMF, the European Central Bank and European governments can be traced back to April 2010,
when they made a fateful mistake. Instead of allowing Greece to default on its insurmountable debts to private creditors,
they chose to lend it the money to pay in full.
Ashoka Mody, Bruegel 21st April 2015

Nobody was forced to lend to Greece.
Initially, private lenders were happy to lend to the Greek government on much the same terms as to the German government.
Then, in 2010, it became clear the money would not be repaid.
Rather than agree to the write-off that was needed, governments (and the International Monetary Fund)
decided to bail out the private creditors by refinancing Greece.
Martin Wolf, FT 21 April 2015

Supporters of the secular-stagnation hypothesis, it seems, have identified the wrong problem.
From a truly secular and global perspective, the difficulty lies in explaining the pre-crisis boom.
More precisely, it lies in explaining the conjunction of three major global developments:
a surge in growth (not stagnation), a decline in inflation, and a reduction in real (inflation-adjusted) interest rates.
Arvind Subramanian Chief Economic Adviser at India’s finance ministry, Projct Syndicate 19 April 2015

ELA
Greek bank shares slide to record low as ECB considers pulling the plug
European Central Bank draws up plans to limit emergency assistance
as Alexis Tsipras gears up to meet Chancellor Merkel on Thursday
Telegraph 21 April 2015

Greece
Juncker: ‘There will be no default’
Politico 20 april 2015

The EU registers everything that happens near its borders.
In contrast to the claims that are often made, they do not look away when refugees die. They are watching very closely.
Maximilian Popp, Der Spiegel 20 April 2015

"Default necessary but Grexit is not"
- "A Greek default must go the whole way and leave the euro"
Wolfgang Münchau and Roger Bootle 19 April 2015

Rather than call upon the combined authority of Euro governance to manage a deep Euro Area-wide sovereign debt workout,
the IMF, through its repeated public assertion of need for primary surplus numbers in that ballpark,
backs the application of Euro Area political authority to condemn a single member—Greece—to further depression,
thereby also prolonging and aggravating the vulnerabilities for the Euro Area as a whole.
Former IMF staffer Peter Doyle, FT Alphaville 17 April 2015

Doyle: Global leaders of the economics profession should turn on the IMF in public.
via Rolf Englund blog 18 april 2015

De som tror på varaktig stagnation har enligt min mening påverkats alltför mycket av de senaste tio årens utveckling.
Min gissning är att både resursutnyttjande och tillväxt i de mest utvecklade länderna inom några år återgår till mer normala tal.
Lars Calmfors, DN 24 mars 2015

Forty years ago, on April 30, 1975
The Vietnam War, as Seen by the Victors
How the North Vietnamese remember the conflict 40 years after the fall of Saigon
The Atlantic, 16 April 2015

"What I find totally baffling is the position of those who are aiming for economic and monetary union
without the creation of new political institutions (apart from a new central bank),
and who raise their hands in horror at the words "federal" or "federalism"."
Wynne Godley, London Review of Books 8 October 1992

Why Europe Needs to Save Greece
Anders Borg, Project Syndicate 12april 2015

Bonds beware as money catches fire in the US and Europe
The broad M3 money
"Forecasters ignore broad money at their peril," says Gabriel Stein, at Oxford Economics.
A dynamic measure of eurozone M3 known as Divisia - tracked by the Bruegel Institute in Brussels - is back to growth levels last seen in 2007.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 15 Apr 2015

Barry Eichengreen: French and German banks have been able to sell their holdings of Greek government bonds, largely to the ECB,
which has acted as bond purchaser of last resort.
via Rolf Englund blog med länk till Anders Borg om detta

Output is financially sustainable when spending patterns and the distribution of income are such that the fruit of economic activity can be absorbed without creating dangerous imbalances in the financial system.
It is unsustainable if generating enough demand to absorb the output of the economy requires too much borrowing, real rates of interest rates that are far below zero, or both.
Martin Wolf, FT 14 April 2015

Is The Crisis Now History In Spain?
Unemployment falling back, to 23.2%
Edward Hugh, 14 april 2015

The developed world seems to be moving toward a long-term zero-interest-rate environment.
Though the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, and the eurozone have kept central-bank policy rates at zero for several years already,
the perception that this was a temporary aberration meant that medium- to long-term rates remained substantial.
If debt can be rolled over forever at zero rates, it does not really matter – and nobody can be considered insolvent.
Daniel Gros, Project Syndicate 10 April 2015

Governments do know how to stop a slide into another Great Depression. But, governments are haunted by fears of large fiscal deficits.
They have relied on monetary expansion, which is politically more acceptable, but also much weaker in its effect
Robert Skidelsky:, Project Syndicate 22 January 2015

Lawrence Summers, veteran policy maker and serial holder of strong opinions.
The thesis that the world is approaching a lasting period of low growth has decisively moved into the mainstream conversation about economics.
Alan Beattie, FT 10 April 2015

Policy makers in Italy, Portugal and Spain say their economies and financial systems are strong enough to survive a Greek departure from the eurozone,
but they acknowledge that Grexit might set a precedent replete with risks for Europe’s 60-year-old integration project.
FT 8 april 2015

Mohamed El-Erian om varför centralbankerna kör nollränta
Skriande uppenbart tycker jag
Rolf Englund blog 7 april 2015

Conundrum
How would the Fed react if long-term US Treasury rates fail to rise after it has started lifting policy rates?
The topic was debated by the economics commentariat at considerable length last year, as the yield curve flattened
and at one point there was a strange, unprecedented fall in correlation between 5-year and 10-year yields
Cardiff Garcia, FT Alphaville 2 April 2015

US hiring slows, adding 126,000 jobs in March
BBC 3 April 2015

On Secular Stagnation: A Response to Bernanke
Lawrence H. Summer 2015

A Greek departure from the eurozone would still be "negative",
but that he believed it would be less damaging now because financial markets were much more confident than they had been in recent years.
However, he added that a "Grexit" would still leave the idea of monetary union in doubt. "It breaks a taboo and sets a precedent," he said.
Former European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso, BBC 2 April 2015

Accidental exit from the eurozone is quite likely — not because Greece or its partners want it
Exit would transform the eurozone from an irrevocable currency union into a regime of hard exchange-rate pegs.
That would be the worst of both worlds: neither as credible as a union nor as flexible as floating rates.
Martin Wolf, FT 31 March 2015

To save the euro, let Greece go
... negotiations will continue until the last minute and concessions on the Greek side may enable the eurozone leaders to “extend and pretend” one more time.
DeAnne Julius, former member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England, FT blog 31 March 2015

Sustaining the Unsustainable Eurozone
When the eurozone was established, its creators envisioned gradual progress toward an “optimal currency area,”
characterized by fiscal integration, the free movement of labor, and political union. But this process has not occurred
Yannos Papantoniou, Greece’s Economy and Finance Minister from 1994 to 2001, Project Syndicate 25 March 2015

Fundamental misalignments that have made life so unbearable for many Europeans.
Imbalances tend to arise in economic life. There is nothing wrong with them in principle as long as they disappear eventually.
But there is no sign of a benign route out of the eurozone’s internal imbalances.
Wolfgang Münchau, FT 29 March 2015

Radarparet Carl Bildt och Margot Wallström hos Kreab i Bryssel

I SVT:s Agenda berättade Margot Wallström (S) att förre utrikesministern Carl Bildt (M), Göran Persson (S)
och S-politikern och diplomaten Pierre Schori blir hedersambassadörer för att driva svensk kandidatur.
SvD 29 mars 2015

Nigeria - Its population is growing rapidly and is forecast to surpass that of America in the coming decades.
The Economist 27 March 2015

Bildt, Dennis, Wibble, Tomas Fischer och
The Central Banker Who Saved the Russian Economy From the Abyss
Rolf Englund 27 mars 2015

Greece is expected to run out of cash as soon as April 9
- ECB höjer Emergency Liquidity Assistance till grekiska banker till €71.3bn, cirka 664 miljarder kr.
Rolf Englund 26 Mars 2015

Stocks are overpriced, overleveraged, headed for trouble
Office of Financial Research: high valuations and high debt levels pose risks
MarketWatch 25 March 2015

US regulators warn RBS and HSBC over living wills
BBC 24 March 2015

Greek and German leaders meet amid cash shortage fears
BBC 23 mars 2015

The success of eurozone QE relies on a confidence trick
Programme’s impact unknown without evidence of how the policy transmits to the real economy
Wolfgang Munchau, FT 22 March 2015

Denna genomklappning av Spaniens två stora partier har givetvis med landets långa och svåra ekonomiska kris att göra,
men det är korruptionen som är den riktiga boven i dramat.
Mauricio Rojas, SvD 21 mars 2015

Claudio Borio
Low inflation, bond yields and interest rates around the world will push the boundaries of economic and political stability to breaking point
if they continue on their downward trajectory, the Bank for International Settlements has warned.
Szu Ping Chan, Telegraph 18 Mar 2015

Why are interest rates so low? The best answer is that the advanced countries are still in a “managed depression”. This malady is deep. It will not end soon.
The fact that vigorous programmes of monetary stimulus have produced such meagre increases in output and inflation indicates just how weak economies now are.
The explosions in private credit seen before the crisis were how central banks sustained demand in a demand-deficient world. Without them, we would have seen something similar to today’s malaise sooner.
Martin Wolf, FT March 17, 2015

Varför är eurofilerna plötsligt så tysta?
På bara 15 år har alltså ett gäng eurofila studentpolitiker tvingat fram det värsta i Europa
Johan Hakelius, Affärsvärlden 24 februari 2015

Euron är ett fullskaleexperiment för att se om Hoover och Brüning och Bildt hade rätt,
om en interndevalvering är möjlig och om åtstramning leder till stimulans
Rolf Englund, 3 mars 2015

The nickname for the IMF in the markets is “It’s mostly fiscal”
Why do the IMF and the other lenders persevere with this destructive path?
The answer is IMP: “It’s mostly political.” That is to say, it is driven by the overriding will to keep the euro on the road.
Roger Bootle, 1 March 2015

I have been pro-EU all my adult life and a proponent of monetary union,
but it is increasingly hard to argue the case for a union that behaves in this manner.
I always felt that euroscepticism was an irrational gut instinct.
But today there exist perfectly rational reasons to op­pose membership both of the eurozone and the EU itself.
Wolfgang Münchau, Financial Times, March 1, 2015

Do eerie parallels presage new crisis?
Falling oil, rising dollar and US rate rise fears also present in 1997-98
Satyajit Das, FT February 23, 2015

It is a sign of low expectations in the handling of the Greek debt crisis
when a deal to keep the country from chaos for four months at the most and only 72 hours at the least
is hailed as a great breakthrough.
FT View 22 February 2015

On Friday, Greek depositors transferred more than €1bn of bank deposits abroad.
The bank system would have collapsed within days without an extension.
And Athens had no plan for a euro exit.
It had no choice but to cut a deal in which the Germans prevailed on all the substantive issues.
Wolfgang Münchau, FT Sunday 22 February 2015

Kan ECB garantera 2.318 miljarder kr hos de grekiska bankerna?
Nej, ta ut pengarna i tid.
Rolf Englund 17 februari 2015

So what are the theoretical and political limits to liquidity provisioning by the ECB?
In a normal bank-run, a central bank needs to provide unlimited liquidity to allow all depositors to withdraw their cash if they wish to.
For the Greek banking system, the theoretical limit would be the size of all deposits.
The Greek banking system has a pretty large deposit base of 243.8 billion
Guntram B. Wolff, Bruegel 17th February 2015

EU-kommissionen finansierar tankesmedjor och projekt som förespråkar fortsatt politisk och ekonomisk integration.
På så sätt hoppas man kunna överbrygga glappet mellan EU-eliten och väljarna
Philip Lerulf, SvD Brännpunkt 16 February 2015

In theory the euro is forever. That is what all the law associated with it says.
And once it is not forever for Greece, it is not forever for any nation, even Germany.
Robert Peston, BBC economics editor, 17 February 2015

Berlin, Paris and the rest simply cannot be confident the euro will be for all time if Greece is either bundled out the exit door or chooses to walk through it.
Because it would demonstrate that the euro had failed in its core underlying purpose,
which was to bind its members ever closer together, economically, financially and - perhaps critically - in a political sense too.
Robert Peston, BBC economics editor, 17 February 2015

SPIEGEL: Mr. Varoufakis, you have referred to the European Union's bailout policy for Greece as "fiscal waterboarding." What exactly do you mean by that?
Varoufakis: For the past five years, Greece has been subjected to austerity measures that it cannot, under any circumstances, meet.
Our country is literally being pushed under water. Just before we suffer an actual cardiac arrest, we are granted a momentary respite.
Then we're pushed back under water, and the whole thing starts again.
My aim is to end this permanent terror of asphyxiation.
Der Spiegel 16 February 2015

Impose capital controls in Greece or repeat the mistake of Cyprus
Hans-Werner Sinn, FT 16 February 2015

Weimar and Greece
Paul Krugman, 15 February 2015

Eurozone must not allow Greece to become another Lehman Brothers
Greece and Germany have been playing a dangerous game of bluff over the future of the eurozone.
The Guardian 15 February 2015

Är det tyskarna som är The Good Guys inom Euroland?
Rolf Englund 15 Februari 2015

Federalism
Berlin has a bottom-line, non-negotiable position on which it will not budge.
This is that the eurozone is not about to become a permanent transfer union – not now, not ever.
Jeremy Warner, Telegraph 14 February 2015

The banks in Greece will not open on Monday, I guess
Rolf Englund, 14 February 2015

The Obama administration, Caroline Atkinson, the US deputy-national security adviser, has leapt to the defence of Greece,
warning Germany and Europe’s creditor powers that they must meet Athens half-way
to avert a potentially dangerous rupture and a euro break-up.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 13 February 2015

Doing the same thing and expecting different results, Einstein is supposed to have said, is the definition of insanity.
In the euro zone it is the ordinary line of business. The fundamental contours of the dispute have not changed.
The new Greek government, priced out of private markets, needs financial help from its euro-zone partners but insists it will leave behind the bail-outs and "fiscal waterboarding" to which its predecessor succumbed.
The euro zone, led but in this case not dominated by Germany, demands that the price of such help is an extension of the current Greek bail-out
The Economist, Friday 13th February 2015

“Ending ELA would be a very last-resort type of intervention, paramount to a nuclear option
The European Central Bank is sending a message to the euro-area’s leaders: don’t make us pull the trigger on Greece’s banks.
After ECB blessed the expansion of so-called Emergency Liquidity Assistance by about 5 billion euros on Thursday,
officials are insisting that continued support is contingent on political talks over Greece’s bailout.
The ECB does not want to be pushed into a position where it is making decisions on the future of the Greek banking system
-- and the country’s membership of the euro -- without political cover from European capitals.
Bloomberg, Friday 13th 2015

The euro is engaged in two dances of death.
The fact that both /ECB and Greece/ threaten euro destruction is testament to the astonishing mis-construction of the euro itself.
Peter Doyle, an economist and former IMF staffer, FT 10 February 2015
Highly Recommended

The risks of mutual misreading between Merkel and the markets on this are potentially catastrophic.
If she wrongly finds affirmation from markets’ quiescence that defenses are strong enough to withstand Grexit and so lets Greece go,
but markets’ quietude actually reflects QE and their belief that she will again crumble, bang goes the euro.
Peter Doyle, an economist and former IMF staffer, FT 10 February 2015

To me it is striking to what extent the economic and political situation in Greece resembles that of Germany in the early 1930s.
The Market Monetarist 13 February 2015

Euron är vår tids guldmyntfot i Europa,
ett fast växelkurssystem som försvaras med ekonomisk åtstramning i länder med massarbetslöshet.
Doften av 30-tal blir allt starkare.
Nils Lundgren, Magasinet Neo, nr 1/2015

Greek banks probably lost about 21 billion euros ($24 billion) of deposits in the past two months.
Bloomberg, 5 February 2015

Greek Finance Minister met ECB president.
Analysts said the ECB statement was a sign the meeting had not been a success.
ECB has effectively just given a green light for Greek bank runs
Rolf Englund 5 februari 2015

What is needed is not structural reform within Greece and Spain so much as structural reform of the eurozone’s design
and a fundamental rethinking of the policy frameworks that have resulted in the monetary union’s spectacularly bad performance.
Joseph E. Stiglitz, Project Syndicate 3 February 2015

The ECB may or may not have good reasons to cut off Greece – depending on your point of view – but let us all be clear that such a move would be political.
A central bank that is supposed to be the lender of last resort and guardian of financial stability would be taking a deliberate and calculated decision to destroy the Greek banking system.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard 2 Feb 2015

The biggest debt write-offs in the history of the world
In 1792BC, the self-proclaimed King Hammurabi of Babylon forgave all citizens’ debts owed to the government, high-ranking officials, and dignitaries.
If any one owe a debt for a loan, and a storm prostrates the grain, or the harvest fail, or the grain does not growth for lack of water,
in that year he need not give his creditor any grain, he washes his debt-tablet in water and pays no rent for this year.
Hammourabi’s jubilees were part of a long line of debt cancellations that can be traced back to Mesopotamia as long ago as 2400BC.
Mehreen Khan, Telegraph, 2 Feb 2015

Simply put, we live in a world in which there is too much supply and too little demand.
The result is persistent disinflationary, if not deflationary, pressure, despite aggressive monetary easing.
Nouirel Roubini, MarketWatch Feb 2, 2015

Hittills har EU-ledarna varit beredda till nästan vad som helst för att förhindra att Grekland lämnar eurosamarbetet.
Man har varit rädd för att överträda ”ett kritstreck” som skulle kunna skapa ohanterliga förväntningar om att fler länder ska göra det.
Lars Calmfors DN 2 februari 2015

Some eurozone policy makers seem to be confident that a Greek exit from the euro, hard or soft,
will no longer pose a threat to the other periphery countries.
They might be right; then again, back in 2008, US policy makers thought that the collapse of one investment house, Bear Stearns,
had prepared markets for the bankruptcy of another, Lehman Brothers.
We know how that turned out.
Kenneth Rogoff, Project Syndicate, 2 February 2015

First and foremost, the eurozone countries’ decision to admit Greece to the single currency in 2002 was woefully irresponsible,
with French advocacy deserving much of the blame.
Back then, Greece conspicuously failed to meet a plethora of basic convergence criteria, owing to its massive debt and its relative economic and political backwardness.

Second, much of the financing for Greece’s debts came from German and French banks that earned huge profits by intermediating loans
from their own countries and from Asia.
They poured this money into a fragile state whose fiscal credibility ultimately rested on being bailed out by other euro members.

Kenneth Rogoff, Project Syndicate, 2 February 2015

The biggest threat is that the European Central Bank ceases to fund Greece's banks.
ECB may well feel obliged to turn off the tap, since right now it is only financing those banks
because the country is officially complying with the terms of its IMF and eurozone bailout.
The moment that Greece was deemed not to be in compliance, it is difficult to see
how the ECB could continue to provide emergency liquidity assistance to Greek banks.
Robert Peston, BBC economics editor, 2 February 2015

Portugal
Syriza has won a general election in Greece and radical leftwing movements could soon be voted into power in Spain and Ireland,
but in another crisis-hit eurozone country it remains business as usual for the political establishment.
FT February 2, 2015

Austerity – the policy of saving your way out of a demand shortfall – simply does not work.
The question now is not whether the German government will accept it, but when.
Will it take a similar debacle for Spain’s conservatives in that country’s coming election
to force Merkel to come to terms with reality?
Joschka Fischer, Project Syndicate JAN 30, 2015

The game is up. It’s time for Greece to leave the eurozone and move on
The stand-off between Greece and the rest of the eurozone will escalate,
neither side will blink and the country will default
Allister Heath, Telegraph 29 Jan 2015

There is now a clear threat of Grexit.
In 2011-12 Mrs Merkel did not want Germany to be blamed for another European disaster,
and both northern creditors and southern debtors were nervous about the consequences
of a chaotic Greek exit for Europe’s banks and their economies.
The Economist, editorial, Jan 31st 2015

Greek Credit Risk Spikes, Default Probability Tops 70%
New Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis reality-exposing comments yesterday,
"the problem with the bailout is that it wasn’t really a bailout... it was an extend and pretend,
'it was a vicious cycle, a debt-deflationary trap, which destroyed our social economy."
zerohedge 28 January 2015

The idea that the Greeks will run large fiscal surpluses for a generation,
to pay back money creditor governments used to rescue private lenders from their folly
is a delusion.
Just 11 per cent of the loans directly financed government activities.
Martin Wolf, FT January 27, 2015

Det är Greklands konstnadsläge/växelkurs, Stupid
Det är inte Greklands skulder som är huvudproblemet.
Det är kostnadsläget.
Rolf Englund 2015-01-27

Why aren't markets panicking about Greece?
Robert Peston, BBC economics editor, 26 January 2015

We discussed this several years ago - in a democracy, austerity will eventually fail at the ballot box.
The people will not tolerate 25% unemployment forever - with no hope in sight.
CalculatedRisk, 25 January 2015

Att den grekiska statsskulden måste skrivas ned, som Syriza kräver,
borde inte vara kontroversiellt. Den går ändå inte att betala.
DN-ledare 2015-01-24

Eurons livslögn: Grekland kommer att återbetala lånen på 2.088 miljarder kronor
Rolf Englund 2013-08-26

Click

Knepet är att trycka nya centralbankspengar som sedan används för att köpa statspapper.
Räntorna pressas, och en viktig effekt är att valutan tappar i värde.
Men åtgärderna är kriminellt senkomna och beslutet tas långt efter både Storbritannien och USA.
OECD understryker att ECB:s sedelpress inte kommer att räcka för att lyfta Europas ekonomier.
DN-ledare 23 januari 2015

QE - Monetary easing will not cure structural difficulties.
But the eurozone did not fall into a slump because supply-side problems suddenly became worse.
It faltered because demand collapsed.
Martin Wolf, FT 22 January 2015

Governments that commit themselves to painful reforms, but receive no help from demand-side policies, will be discredited and then rejected.
The eurozone might soon find itself coping with populist governments of the left or right utterly opposed to the policies imposed upon them.
Martin Wolf, FT 22 January 2015

If investors perceived that the central bank of Italy, for example, were taking on unaffordable risks when buying Italian government bonds,
at that point the price of those bonds would fall, the implicit interest rate paid by the Italian government would rise,
and the whole point of QE would be blown up.
Robert Peston, BBC economics editor, 22 January 2015

Two Greek banks have applied for emergency funding from the European Central Bank as a “precautionary measure”
against a possible run on deposits ahead of a critical general election on Jan 25, a senior Athens banker said on Friday.
FT 16 January 2015

The European Court of Justice has declared
legal supremacy over the sovereign state of Germany, and therefore of Britain, France, Denmark and Poland as well.
If the Karlsruhe accepts this, the implication is that Germany will no longer be a fully self-governing sovereign state.
"This Union" - meaning the Union to which EU integrationists aspire
- is currently blocked by the German court, the last safeguard of our nation states against encroachment.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 14 Jan 2015

The real risk for the eurozone is that Greek default and euro departure go relatively well
Roger Bootle, Telegraph 11 Jan 2015, via Rolf Englund blog

Ever since his “whatever it takes” speech of mid-2012, ECB president Mario Draghi has been hinting that QE salvation is just around the corner.
That’s allowed cash-strapped eurozone governments to borrow at ultra-low interest rates even while presiding over moribund economies and national balance sheets riddled with debt.
Liam Halligan, Telegraph 10 Jan 2015

Tre av Allianspartiernas partiledare har skickat fram några underhuggare,
Anna Kinberg Batra (M), Roger Tiefensee (C), Stefan Attefall (KD)
för att på DN Debatt 14/1 2010 göra något slags markering om EMU.
Rolf Englund blog 14 januari 2010

Goldman Warns Market Implications Of Europe's Populist Revolt Are "Profound"
The initial response to the electoral threat of populist Eurosceptic parties has been the formation of ‘grand coalition’ governments
Tyler Durden zerohedge 9 January 2015

The odds of France leaving the Eurozone, or Frexit, have just gone from a tail risk to plausible
thanks to the boost the Hedbo shootings have given to the leader of France’s far right party, the National Front, and its leader, Marine Le Pen.
Opinion polls indicate that that she would win the first round of a presidential ballot were elections held now.
NakedCapitalism Yves Smith January 9, 2015

Europe is not a victim. The EU’s malaise is self-inflicted, owing to an unprecedented succession of bad economic decisions, beginning with the creation of the euro.
Repeatedly, voters have thrown out incumbents, dissatisfied with the direction of the economy
– only to have the new government continue on the same course dictated from Brussels, Frankfurt, and Berlin.
But for how long can this continue?
Joseph E. Stiglitz, Project Syndicate 8 January 2015

Houseprices - Change will come only once people recognise how unjust this situation has become
Massive transfers of resources across generations —
and, within generations, to people whose parents own properties — which is arguably more important.
Martin Wolf, FT January 8, 2015

Mr Draghi issued his own cri de coeur in Helsinki six weeks ago, laying out the "minimum requirements for monetary union".
His prescription amounts to an EU superstate, with economic sovereignty to be "exercised jointly".
His plea is Utopian. There is no popular groundswell anywhere for such a vaulting leap forward
The northern creditor states have in any case spent the past four years methodically preventing any durable pooling of risk or any step towards fiscal union.
In airing such thoughts, Mr Draghi is really telling us that he no longer thinks EMU can work.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard 7 Jan 2015

The U.S. dollar, at its highest level in nine years, is about to fall off its perch.
That’s the outlook, at least, of Lawrence G. McDonald, n his New York Times best-seller, “A Colossal Failure of Common Sense,” warned colleagues at Lehman Brothers
Energy companies took out $1.6 trillion worth of debt since 2009. Since 2012, emerging market governments and companies have taken out around $2 trillion worth of debt.
The catch here is that they often borrowed in dollars.
MarketWatch 7 january 2015

Here’s one road map for a Greek eurozone exit
One possible path was detailed by economist Roger Bootle, the plan won the 2012 Wolfson Economics Prize,
which was a contest for proposals on how to dismantle the eurozone.
MarketWatch Jan 7, 2015

The mismanaged collapse of Northern Rock before it collapsed into public hands.
Before the crisis, the Bank did not have oversight of individual institutions, and there was no mechanism for banks at risk of failure.
Telegraph 7 January 2015

A month before the start of the financial crisis,
the Bank of England was apparently unaware of the impending danger, new documents reveal.
In a unique insight into its workings, the Bank has published minutes of top-secret meetings of its governing body, the Court, between 2007 and 2009.
BBC 7 January 2015

Money is a store of value, quoth the obsolete textbooks.
Post-Lehman, money is rather an instrument of public policy.
In the past seven years central banks have conjured more than $10tn of digital wampum.
Still, prosperity eludes them.
James Grant Financial Times January 5, 2015

Most Americans are worse off than they were at the beginning of the 21st century,
while the top sliver are dramatically richer.
Edward Luce, FT 4 January 2015

Richard Koo’s ‘The Escape from Balance Sheet Recession and the QE Trap’ should be read
Review by Martin Wolf, FT January 4, 2015

Greece exit
“In the short run, it would be Lehman Brothers squared,” Eichengreen warned.
Kenneth Rogoff, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund and a Harvard professor, said the euro “is a historic disaster.”
“I think there may be no way to end to euro crisis,” Feldstein said.
MarketWach 5 January 2015

Om Grekland lämnar valutasamarbetet
Förutsättningarna för att hantera denna påfrestning är betydligt bättre än för några år sedan
menar tongivande ekonomer som SvD Näringsliv talat med 5 januari 2015

Investors seem to be betting that the people of Italy, Spain and France will peek at the chaos in Athens,
shudder—and stick to the austerity that Germany’s Angela Merkel has prescribed for them. But that seems too sanguine to this newspaper.
It is hard to believe that a Greek crisis will not unleash fresh ructions elsewhere in the euro zone
not least because some of Mrs Merkel’s medicine is patently doing more harm than good.
The Economist editorial 3 January 2015

This is going to be the year in which the eurozone will have its moment of truth.
Three scheduled elections — in Greece this month; in Portugal and in Spain in the second half of the year —
will tell us whether the EU’s approach to crisis resolution works politically or not.
Wolfgang Münchau FT January 4, 2015

What must change is the way in which nations are treated like wayward children.
People not just in the periphery, but in Italy and France, the euro’s second and third countries,
and the EU’s co-founders, are fed up with being dictated to.
It does not help when the orders themselves are wrong-headed,
as in the case of universally applied demand-destroying economic policies.
Financial Times editorial December 29, 2014

That does not mean fiscal or political union.
If all the euro’s member states and, more importantly, their peoples,
were freely willing to take such a step, this newspaper would welcome it.
But the tolerance for further integration is at rock bottom.
Financial Times editorial December 29, 2014

So desperate has their position become that Greeks may be about to vote for economic and political suicide
rather than tolerate any more of the medicine prescribed to them by Berlin and Brussels.
Jeremy Warner, Telegraph 29 Dec 2014

Policy makers remain wilfully blind to the reality that the debt problem is unresolved,
and that the eurozone’s outstanding public sector borrowings will never be repaid in full.
The West German economic miracle was launched from a clean balance sheet while the Allies remained heavily indebted.
John Plender, FT December 29, 2014

The spectre of Greece's exit from the single currency - or "Grexit" - once again.
Eurozone policymakers have consistently ruled out that possibility because they are wary of opening Pandora's box.
Linda Yueh, BBC Chief business correspondent, 29 December 2014

Snap elections in Greece open the way for an anti-austerity government
and a cathartic showdown over the terms of euro membership.
Yields on 3-year Greek debt surged 185 basis points to 11.9pc
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 29 Dec 2014

Eurozone’s weakest link is the voters
The euro crisis is back.
The rise of anti-system parties threatens a currency that depends on consensus
Gideon Rachman, FT December 29, 2014

The aging of the boomer generation should “severely cut U.S. stock values in the near future,”
reducing the P/E ratio of the S&P 500 index by more than half over the next decade.
MarketWatch 29 December 2014

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke believes
history has already vindicated the novel efforts of the U.S. central bank to revive the economy after the financial crisis of 2008.
MarkerWatch 29 December 2014

Helikopterpengar
Lars EO Svensson 2014-12-29

Till skillnad från för 20 år sedan är dagens kris enbart hemmatillverkad.
När Carl Bildt och Ingvar Carlsson gjorde upp om två krispaket hade de ett stenhårt marknadstryck emot sig,
som delvis hängde samman med en europeisk valutastorm.
Peter Wolodarski 27 december 2014

Federal Reserve is headed down a familiar – and highly dangerous – path.
Steeped in denial of its past mistakes, the Fed is pursuing the same incremental approach
that helped set the stage for the financial crisis of 2008-2009.
The consequences could be similarly catastrophic.
Stephen S. Roach, Project Syndicate,23 December 2014

Biggles i öknen - South Atlantic air ferry route
Rolf Englund blog 25 december 2014

The US Federal Reserve and other western central banks have failed to anticipate this deflation environment,
persistently undershoot their inflation targets and appear powerless to reverse the trend.
At some point, we will probably wonder if it is time for the anti-deflation baton to pass to governments.
George Magnus, FT December 24, 2014

In the next act of the eurozone’s economic drama, keep a close eye on Spain
2015 could be when we find out, one way or another, whether the current strategy for fixing the eurozone is workable
— not just economically but politically
Stephanie Flanders, FT December 21, 2014

Finanskrisen
Martin Wolf på Financial Times är, vågar jag påstå, den världsledande journalisten på området finansiell ekonomi.
När han analyserar den globala finanskris som fortfarande pågår lyssnar alla som vill förstå.
Nils Lundgren, Axess Magasin nr 8, november 2014

A stock market bubble exists when the value of stocks
has more impact on the economy than the economy has on the value of stocks.
John Makin, American Enterprise Institute, 2000-11-09

Carry trade
How the Rising Dollar Could Trigger the Next Global Financial Crisis
John Mauldin's Outside the Box on 12-11-2014

According to BIS data, there are some $2.6tn of outstanding international debt securities from emerging market borrowers,
Corporate leverage in regions such as Asia is considerably higher today, relative to gross domestic product, than it was before the 1998 Asian financial crisis
Gillian Tett, FT December 18, 2014

Fed calls time on $5.7 trillion of emerging market dollar debt
The stronger the US boom, the worse it will be for those countries on the wrong side of the dollar
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard 17 Dec 2014

Biggles, kärleken och järnridån
Rolf Englund blog 19 december 2014

The US Federal Reserve has pulled the trigger. Emerging markets must now brace for their ordeal by fire.
They have collectively borrowed $5.7 trillion in US dollars, a currency they cannot print and do not control.
This hard-currency debt has tripled in a decade, split between $3.1 trillion in bank loans and $2.6 trillion in bonds.
It is comparable in scale and ratio-terms to any of the biggest cross-border lending sprees of the past two centuries.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard 17 Dec 2014

The Fed put
Federal Reserve uttered the single word “patience” and everything changed.
On Wednesday the stock market rose 2 per cent and on Thursday the Dow Jones Industrial index had its best day in three years.
The market dependence on Fed policy has never seemed greater
Financial Times December 19, 2014

There is no chance whatsoever of Greece, or for that matter several other periphery Eurozone economies, repaying their debts.
Jeremy Warner, Telegraph 16 December 2014

Why Paul Krugman is wrong
Central banks can always create inflation if they try hard enough
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 15 December 2014

In about 1980, there was a big change in the way academic economists did macroeconomics.
Since 2009, there has been a big debate in the economics blogosphere about whether academic econ took a wrong turn when it switched tactics
Noah Smith, Bloomberg, 12 December 2014

It beggars belief that Athens will ever repay all its debts.
Tony Barber, FT December 12, 2014

Oil price fall driven by failed speculation?
I heard on BBC or was it CNN that the explanation was that
hedgefunds and others had invested with borrowed money with the oil contracts as collateral.
Now we se a lot of Margin Calls, Don´t we?
Rolf Englund blog 12 december 2014

The euro is still vulnerable, and Greece is not the only problem
Even if the immediate threat of break-up has receded, the longer-term threat to the single currency has, if anything, increased.
The Economist, Dec 13th 2014 print

Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em.
Germany did not seek the euro. On the contrary, it was a price others foolishly asked Germans to pay for unification.
German policy makers understood the political and economic implications of a currency union.
Those of almost all other would-be members did not.
Martin Wolf, FT December 9, 2014

Are we in a bull market, or are we still in a secular bear market?
It looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, but it’s a secular bear
John Authers, FT December 5, 2014

The best books of 2014
The Economist print Dec 6th 2014

Europe’s QE Quandary
Shouldn't the ECB Buy Bonds, Too?
Jana Randow, Bloomberg, Dec 3, 2014

“We have a lacuna in financial regulation — the assumption behind the fair value accounting standards and regulatory capital is
that the values used by institutions are comparable — it would seem that they are not!”
Sir David Tweedie, chairman of the International Valuation Standards Council, FT 4 December 2014

Hur kan det komma sig att man införde den vanvettiga beslutsprocessen
som nu utmynnat i regeringskris och extraval?
Rolf Englund blog 4 december 2014

The flow of Opec petrodollars into global financial markets is set to dry up
as the collapse in the oil price delivers a $316bn hit to the cartel’s revenues.
The $316bn figure would be much higher if other big oil exporters including Russia,
Norway, Mexico, Kazakhstan and Oman are taken into account.
Financial Times, 3 December 2014

Carl Bildts och Alliansens ansvar för den uppkomna situationen
Rolf Englund blog 2014-12-03

Pamflett skriven av Joschka Fischer: Scheitert Europa? (Misslyckas Europa?).
Det europeiska samarbetet är på väg mot fiasko. EU-projektet har aldrig varit så hotat som i dag.
Finanskrisen aktualiserade de alltjämt olösta existentiella frågorna om EU:s mål och medel.
Det traditionellt tongivande samarbetet mellan Tyskland och Frankrike blockeras av att båda vägrar diskutera framtiden.
Rolf Gustavsson, SvD 23 november 2014

Lunchtime on Sunday, September 14, 2008, and I was working from my apartment in New York’s East Village.
It had been a hectic weekend, preceded by a week of speculation as to what the future held for Lehman Brothers.
Car after car had lined up outside the New York Federal Reserve waiting for the heads of
America’s biggest banks and a host of US banking and financial regulators.
By Saturday night it seemed clear from talking to those involved that
a solution for Lehman would be agreed by the end of the weekend.
James Quinn, Telegraph Business Editor, 29 November 2014

Best books of 2014: Economics
Martin Wolf, FT November 28, 2014

Jean Monnet
The European Union is suffering from a democracy problem:
Too many Europeans feel that integration is being forced upon them.
What's worse, they may be right.
Mark Buchanan, former editor of Nature, Bloomberg View, 28 November 2014

The Deluge:
The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order, 1916-1931
by Adam Tooze. Review by Tony Barber, FT May 30, 2014

Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary at War, 1914-1918
‘We began the war, not the Germans and still less the Entente,”
Baron Leopold von Andrian-Werburg, a young Austrian diplomat, admitted in December 1918.
Review by Adam Tooze, Nov. 21, 2014

In my book, The Shifts and the Shocks, I suggest that a number of shifts in the world economy
created chronically weak demand in the absence of credit booms.
US, the eurozone, Japan and the UK have been suffering from “chronic demand deficiency syndrome”.
More precisely, their private sectors have failed to spend enough to bring output close to its potential
without the inducements of ultra-aggressive monetary policies, large fiscal deficits, or both.
Martin Wolf, FT November 25, 2014

Margit Gennser var moderaternas ledamot
Pensionsöverenskommelsen är det mest långvariga och stabila blocköverskridande samarbete Sverige har haft på senare decennier.
Den var ett svar på 90-talskrisen och ett problem som fem partier kände av och erkände. Det förpliktar än i dag.
DN-ledare 26 november 2014

Owen Paterson, the former environment secretary, will urge the prime minister
to apply to leave the EU two years before holding a referendum.
Rolf Englund blog 24 november 2014

Saint-Barthélemy. Med expansionen ökar antalet bilar.
”Ön klarar inte all trafik. Och folk har jättestora bilar. På Bermuda får man bara ha en bil per person och fordonens storlek är begränsad.
Jag har föreslagit att man bara får skaffa en ny bil om man skrotar en annan”, säger den svenske finansmannen Tomas Fischer,
som har ett hus inte långt från familjen Rockefellers pionjärbygge.
Dagens Industri 2012-06-20

Why a house-price bubble means trouble
Ccontrast today’s low-inflation economies with the high inflation of the 1970s and 1980s.
Back then, paying off your mortgage was a sprint: After five years of that, inflation had eroded the value of the debt and mortgage repayments shrank dramatically in real terms.
Today, a mortgage is a marathon.
Interest rates are low, so repayments seem affordable. Yet with inflation low and wages stagnant, they’ll never become more affordable.
Tim Harford, FT 21 November 2014

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble:
European economic and monetary affairs commissioner should have veto powers over national budgets that breach eurozone criteria.
"We need to show that we want to jointly proceed toward a fiscal union,"
France24, 23 November 2014

Radical left is right about Europe’s debt
The tragedy of today’s eurozone is the sense of resignation with which the establishment parties of the centre-left and the centre-right are
allowing Europe to drift into the economic equivalent of a nuclear winter.
You may not consider yourself a supporter of the radical left.
But if you lived in the eurozone and supported those policies, that would be your only choice.
Wolfgang Münchau, FT November 23, 2014

Peter Wolodarski @pwolodarski
Wolfgang Münchau har nog rätt om detta

Germany’s policymakers deny the eurozone’s crisis-ridden countries a more active fiscal policy;
refuse to support a European investment agenda to generate demand and growth;
have declared a fiscal surplus, rather than faster potential growth, as their primary domestic goal;
and have begun turning against the European Central Bank (ECB) in the struggle against deflation and a credit crunch.
On all four counts, Germany is wrong.
Marcel Fratzscher, Project Syndicate 21 November 2014

It took some 14 years, but we’re back to the real highs before the bubble pop This slow-and-steady crawl has given us
a return, finally, to the levels the S&P was at, inflation adjusted, at the tip-top of the dot-com bubble.
MarketWatch 21 November 2014

Party Now, Apocalypse Later
Valuations are going to revert to the mean. They always do.
And when they do, they’ll overshoot in the process. The business cycle still exists.
Wolf Richter, November 19, 2014

Brazil's Petrobras is the most indebted company in the world.
PwC has refused to sign off on the books. The stock price has dropped 87pc from the peak.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 19 Nov 2014

Gavyn Davies, The very long run equity bull market and
Lawrence Summers and Paul Krugman on secular stagnation
Gavyn Davies, FT blog, Nov 09 2014

Conundrum
Alan Greenspan couldn’t control long-term interest rates a decade ago,
and bond investors are betting Janet Yellen’s luck will be no better.
Bloomberg, 19 November 2014

Ultimately, economic progress depends on creativity.
That is why fear of “secular stagnation” in today’s advanced economies has many wondering how creativity can be spurred.
One prominent argument lately has been that what is needed most is Keynesian economic stimulus – for example, deficit spending.
After all, people are most creative when they are active, not when they are unemployed.
Robert J. Shiller, a 2013 Nobel laureate in economics, Professor of Economics at Yale University, Project Syndicate 18 november 2014

Today’s most important economic illness: chronic demand deficiency syndrome.
David Cameron “red warning lights are once again flashing on the dashboard of the global economy”.
Martin Wolf, Financial Times 18 november 2014

The lights are again flashing red on the dashboard of the world economy, David Cameron warned yesterday.
Just to extend the metaphor, the plane is flying on empty, having pretty much exhausted its fiscal and monetary reserves,
and there is no sign of a safe landing strip in sight.
Jeremy Warner, Telegraph, 18 Nov 2014

Moderaterna har rört sig från 150 procents entusiasm till ett mer dämpat EU-förhållande.
Grundackordet är fortfarande positivt, men där finns även andra klanger.
All lycka sägs inte längre komma från Bryssel.
Peter Wolodarski, DN 16 november 2014

Finanskriskommittén
Riksgäldens garantiprogram för bankerna infördes 2008.
Sammanlagt ställdes bankgarantier för 354 miljarder kronor.
SvD Näringsliv 18 november 2014

Spanska sjukan, en epidemi baserad på ett muterat influensavirus slukade minst 21 miljoner människor mellan 1918 och 1920
Det är högst troligt att det verkliga antalet döda var högre, kanske mellan 30 och 40 miljoner; vissa forskare har gissat på över 100 miljoner.
Detta ska jämföras med att första världskriget slukade 9,2 miljoner soldatliv i egentlig strid och sammanlagt, omkring 15 miljoner människor.
Trots det lyser spanska sjukan med sin frånvaro – eller omnämns blott i en pliktskyldig bisats – i många historieböcker.
Dick Harrison, SvD Understeckare, 15 november 2014

The Germans have a name for their unique economic framework: ordoliberalism.
Wolfgang Münchau FT 16 November 2014

List of economic crises
Wikipedia

Hushållens belåningsgrad, skuldkvoten, uppgick 2012 till 165 procent av disponibel inkomst efter skatt.
Det är inte alls märkligt att skuldbördan bekymrar såväl Riksbankens ledning som privatekonomer.
Ytterst märkligt är dock det faktum att skulderna länge funnits med ansvariga politikers goda minne.
Maria Ludvigsson, SvD 13 november 2014

En tid efter att regeringen Bildt hade förlorat riksdagsvalet 1994,
gick en ung riksdagsledamot vid namn Fredrik Reinfeldt till frontalangrepp på partiets ledning.
Partiet var enligt Reinfeldt alldeles för toppstyrt, det var för lågt i tak och den inre kretsen
– det så kallade "bunkergänget" – bestod enligt Reinfeldt av "Carl Bildt-kopior".
Fnordspotting 12 november 2014

Dinkelspiel
Riksbanken lämnade den 17 september 1992 E. Öhman J:r Fondkommission AB ett lån på 750 miljoner kronor till 34 % ränta, när marginalräntan var 500 %.
Sedan det konstaterats att lånet byggt på ett missförstånd gjordes räntevillkoren om till 210 %, vilket bedömdes motsvara en vid denna tidpunkt gällande marknadsränta för Öhman.
Lånet löpte under tre räntedagar.
RE: England hade låtit pundet flyta den 16 september

Janerik Larsson: Jag kan försäkra att om ett EMU-medlemskap funnits med i ja-sidans argumentation /inför folkomröstningen 1994/ skulle Sverige i dag inte varit medlem i EU.

Thomas Gür: Stadda vid god kassa, i en ohelig allians över blockgränserna och professionellt realistiskt/cyniska i handlaget, förmådde vi övertala en knapp majoritet av väljarna att i några veckor i mitten av november 1994 vara för ett svenskt medlemskap. I den mån vi inte larvade oss med paroller som att det är roligare att säga ja, var ett kardinalargument att man skulle rösta ja för jobbens skull.

Läs detta och mer till om Folkomröstningen 1994

Bostadsbubbla i Sverige?
Det är ju väldigt svårt att veta.
Bostadspriserna och hushållens upplåning har stigit mycket,
men det finns ju reala faktorer som lågt byggande och en dåligt fungerande hyresmarknad som kan förklara det.

Samtidigt finns det argument som talar för att vi har en boprisbubbla också.
Lars Calmfors, SvD Näringsliv 13 november 2014

It is with regret and sadness we announce the death of money on November 16th 2014 in Brisbane, Australia
G20 will announce that bank deposits are just part of commercial banks’ capital structure,
and also that they are far from the most senior portion of that structure.
With deposits then subjected to a decline in nominal value following a bank failure, will some investors prefer banknotes to bank deposits?
Such a change in preference is known as a "bank run."
Russell Napier of ERIC, via zerohedge, 11 November 2014

Allt Du behöver veta om vädret och The Jet Stream
Rolf Englund blog 12 November 2014

The Republican victory in the midterm elections was a triumph for its strategy of
sustained vilification of the president and obstruction of his policies.
The most important consequence of this election may therefore be to
bury what little hope remained of getting to grips with the risk of dangerous climate change.
Martin Wolf, FT 11 November 2014

Många svenskar betalar inte alls av på sina bolån medan
den genomsnittliga återbetalningstiden för de som amorterar enligt Finansinspektionen är 100 år.
Det finns ett mönster historiskt sett att finansiella kriser föregåtts av hög skuldsättning och snabba prisökningar på bostäder.
SvD Näringsliv 10 november 2014

The euro is in greater peril today than at the height of the crisis
Insurrectional electorates more likely to vote for a new generation of leaders
Wolfgang Münchau, FT November 9, 2014

- Tiden när Nationalteatern ljudsatte fabriksgolvet är grogrunden för boken.
Då alternativvänstern skördade framgångar, FNL-rörelsen ville se ett slut på Vietnamkriget...
Erica Treijs på SvD Kultur den 9 november 2014 i sin stora intervju med Ebba Witt-Brattström.
Rolf Englund blog 9 november 2014

Mario Draghi's efforts to save EMU have hit the Berlin Wall
If the ECB tries to press ahead with QE, Germany's central bank chief will resign.
If it does not do so, the eurozone will remain stuck in a lowflation trap and Mario Draghi will resign
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 5 November 2014

Deep Divisions Emerge over ECB Quantitative Easing Plans
Some view /ECB/ bond purchases as unavoidable, as the euro zone could otherwise slide into dangerous deflation
Others warn against a violation of the ECB principle, which prohibits funding government debt by printing money.
Der Spiegel, 3 November 2014

The depression of 1920-21 has much to teach modern policymakers
The Crash That Cured Itself. By James Grant.
The Economist print 8 November 2014

Skriande uppenbart - Quantitative Easing
Ordinarily, the role of tax and spending in smoothing economic cycles is to stand back and let monetary policy do the job.
But these are not ordinary times. In the advanced world, weak growth and the threat of deflation have driven monetary policy towards its limit.
In such circumstances, fiscal policy has an important counter-cyclical role.
Financial Times editorial 7 November 2014

Amorteringars effekter på bostadspriser och konsumtion
I samband med finanskrisen har bostadspriserna fallit i många EU-länder.
Den höga skuldsättningen verkar ha förstärkt den ekonomiska nedgången i flera länder.
Rapporten visar hur amorteringar kan påverka bostadspriser och bolånens utveckling vid olika belåningsgrader, räntenivåer och amorteringsformer.
Sieps 2014

Men måste inte Riksbanken ta hänsyn till sitt inflationsmål?
- Jo, men denna hänsyn måste vara underordnad målet finansiell stabilitet.
Det går inte att uppnå inflationsmålet om vi inte har finansiell stabilitet.
Vi har idag inflation i Sverige, men inte konsumentprisinflation, som Riksbanken vill ha,
utan tillgångsprisinflation, som Riksbanken inte vill ha.
Cervenka möter Lars Jonung, SvD Näringsliv 7 november 2014

Lars Jonung är kritisk mot den förre ledamoten i Riksbanksdirektionen Lars E O Svensson,
SvD 6 november 2014

EMU kan hota freden i Europa
Margit Gennser och Hans Wallmark, DN 30 oktober 1995

British house prices have fallen 35pc in real terms since the peak in 2007
This is a 16pc fall in nominal terms but the full scale of the correction has been disguised
by accumulated inflation over these years, deliberately engineered by the Bank of England
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 3 November 2014

Nils-Eric Sandberg om Sven Rydenfelt och hyresregleringen
Efter ett seminarium för tjugofem år sedan satt vi några och diskuterade liberalism – rättare bristen på liberalism i svensk politik.
En frågade: Finns det någon verklig liberal i Sverige? Alla övriga skrek unisont: Ja, Sven Rydenfelt!
Nils-Eric Sandberg, DN 21 januari 2011

“whatever it takes” to save the euro, including purchasing “unlimited” amounts of struggling governments’ bonds
According to the German Constitutional Court, the policy violates European Union treaties – a ruling that the European Court of Justice is now reviewing.
The ECJ’s decision will have important implications for the eurozone’s future, for it will define what authority, if any, the ECB has to intervene in a debt crisis.
Gita Gopinath, Project Syndicate 3 November 2014

Stefan Ingves
I oktober 2009 varnade riksbanken i stabilitetsrapporten.
Sedan dess har svenska hushålls lån ökat med 742 miljarder kronor, varav 619 miljarder är bolån.
Samtidigt har en snittlägenhet i Stockholms innerstad stigit från 3,5 till 4,5 miljoner
Sara Bränström, SvD Näringsliv 31 oktober 2014

Quantitative easing may sown the seeds of the next great markets disaster
those who prophesied that these trillions of dollars of debt purchases would spark uncontrollable inflation have been proved wrong.
But QE could still prove toxic.
Robert Peston, BBC Economics editor, 29 October 2014

Det är oklart varför målet är just 2 procents inflation, med hur mycket Sverige har missat målet,
och hur stor skada detta eventuellt gjort för sysselsättningen.
Även om samtliga dessa frågetecken skulle rätas ut är det alltjämt tveksamt om riksbanken med sin styrränta kan göra något åt inflationen.
Andreas Bergh, kolumn SvD 3 november 2014

Shadow banking nears pre-crisis peak
FT October 30, 2014

Spain
“On the macroeconomic level you see that things are going better. But our people see no change,”
“There are more and more people whose unemployment benefits have run out, and who have used up all their financial reserves.”
FT 30 October 2014

"extend and pretend/delay and pray"
Bank stress tests an unconvincing fudge
Willem Buiter, FT 30 October 2014

A future crisis is likely to unfold as follows.
New institutional arrangements and banking regulations have altered market structures in ways likely to amplify shocks in a future financial crisis.
Designed to address problems exposed by the global financial crisis and to reduce instability, new initiatives may have done the reverse.
Satyajit Das, FT October 29, 2014

John Maynard Keynes Is the Economist the World Needs Now
Politicians ignored Keynes in 1937. Doing so again could tank the economy
Peter Coy, Businessweek's economics editor, October 30, 2014

Medianvärdet för föreningslån i hus inflyttningsklara 2011–2013, är cirka 10 000 kronor per kvm
Bostadsrättsföreningars dolda skulder ”en tickande bomb”
Kreditupplysningsföretaget UC varnar för kombinationen höga föreningslån och ohållbara avskrivningar. Nu kräver man bättre information i säljprospekten till köparna.
Johan Hellekant, SvD Näringsliv 14 oktober 2014 (papper 28 oktober

America’s experience in the 1960s should have warned the eurozone’s creators that tying national monetary authorities’ hands might not be such a good idea.
Europe’s leaders must recognize that the eurozone, as it is currently constituted, is larger than Europe’s optimal currency area.
Some of its member countries – certainly Greece, and probably Italy and Spain – need an independent monetary policy.
Koichi Hamada, Special Economic Adviser to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Professor of Economics at Yale University, Projet Syndicate 28 October 2014

As Robert Schuman promised when he conceived the idea of a European Community,
integration has prevented the recurrence of war between Germany and France.
But whether monetary union on such a large scale was necessary to achieve this goal is dubious.
Koichi Hamada, Special Economic Adviser to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Professor of Economics at Yale University,
Projet Syndicate 28 October 2014

Will the asset quality review and stress tests conducted by the European Central Bank and the European Banking Authority mark a turning point in the eurozone’s crisis?
Leverage is 20 to 1 in Spain and Italy; 25 to 1 in Germany and France; and 30 Lto 1 in the Netherlands.
It is question­able whether this is enough loss-absorbing capital.
Martin Wolf, FT October 28, 2014

Greenspan said that the Fed’s quantitative easing has failed in one of its goals, to spur demand.
Inflation is “dead in the water” because effective demand is “dead in the water,”
But quantitative easing has been a “terrific success” in getting the real rate of return on long-term assets down,
boosting all income-earning assets.
MarketWatch 29 October 2014

Riksbanken har sänkt räntan till noll.
Jag tycker det är skriande uppenbart att räntan världen över är för låg och
att en större del av stimulanserna borde ske via finanspolitiken.
Rolf Engund blog 28 oktober 2014

"Linköping är redo för ebola"
– Scenariot vi bygger på är en svårt sjuk patient.
Vi skulle kunna ha två patienter med ungefär samma insatser. Men resurserna skulle då kanske inte räcka till
SvD 27 oktober 2014

Manuel Valls, the French prime minister, declared
“We are a great nation" - France is a sovereign country.”
FT October 20, 2014

France bows to EU pressure on budget deficit
FT 27 October 2014

In an act of studied contempt, Mr Renzi’s government published online
the Commission’s “strictly confidential” letter demanding an explanation for Italy’s draft 2015 budget.
Mr Renzi said he wanted greater transparency and would, in future, be publishing not just the Commission’s letters,
“but all the financial data on how much is spent in these buildings. It’ll be a lot of fun.”
It is the sort of remark you might expect from a eurosceptic like Nigel Farage rather than the leader of
the country that currently occupies the EU’s rotating presidency.
Charlemagne, The Economist 26 October 2014

The world's oldest surviving bank, Monte dei Paschi di Siena (MPS)
Shares in Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena were suspended on Monday,
after the Italian lender and eight of its domestic peers emerged as the standout losers in health checks
aimed at restoring confidence in the euro area’s financial sector.
Financial Times 27 October 2014

Carl-Johan Westholm och Jeffrey D. Sachs: alla investeringar are not equal
Rolf Englund blog 27 oktober 2014

Otmar Issing, ECB’s former chief economist, one of my Gurus,
apparantly does not understand that Germany no longer is an idependent state, regarding monetary policy.
Rolf Englund blog 24 October 2014

This parrot has ceased to be
Unlike Japan, which has a homogenous, stoic society, the euro area cannot hang together through years of economic sclerosis and falling prices.
As debt burdens soar from Italy to Greece, investors will take fright, populist politicians will gain ground,
and — sooner rather than later — the euro will collapse.
The Economist print, editorial, October 25th 2014

The fiscal compact – formally the Treaty on Stability, Coordination, and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls and his Italian counterpart, Matteo Renzi, have declared – or at least insinuated –
that they will not comply with the fiscal compact to which all of the eurozone’s member countries agreed in 2012
Their stance highlights a fundamental flaw in the structure of the European Monetary Union
– one that Europe’s leaders must recognize and address before it is too late.
Hans-Werner Sinn, Project Syndicate 22 October 2014

A specter is haunting dismal scientists,
an economic nightmare with an ugly name. It’s secular stagnation
Bloomberg 22 October 2014

Malmström får överrock
Efter kritik och debatt här i EU-parlamentet efter utfrågningen av Cecilia Malmström så gav Jean-Claude Juncker i dag beskedet att vice ordföranden, socialdemokraten Frans Timmermans från Nederländerna,
får ett särskilt ansvar för att övervaka förhandlingarna om ett handelsavtal med USA.
Förhandlingar som egentligen är Cecilia Malmströms huvuduppgift kommande mandatperiod.
Rolf Fredriksson, SvT 22 oktober 2014

If you want an indication of the collective mood in France at the moment,
try this for a best-selling book title: Le Suicide français, by Éric Zemmour.
Its 530 pages are a relentless polemic against what Zemmour calls the destruction of the nation by a “vast subversive project” imposed via feminism, globalisation, immigration and the “monstrous Brussels bureaucracy”.
Hugh Carnegy, FT October 21, 2014

Secular stagnation
Eurozone policy makers face three choices.
First, they can transform the eurozone into a political union, and do whatever it takes:
a eurobond, a small fiscal union, transfer mechanisms and a banking union worthy of its name.
Second, they can accept secular stagnation.
The final choice is a break-up of the eurozone.
Wolfgang Münchau, FT October 19, 2014

Borders and budgets risks provoking political crises
that could plausibly culminate in the break-up of the euro, or even the EU.
Gideon Rachman, FT October 20, 2014

Defiant France ignores the abyss
There is the argument in government ministries and the smoke-free conference rooms of Brussels,
as politicians and bureaucrats attempt to define new continent-wide rules to ensure Europe does not slip back into a new and debilitating debt crisis.
But the future of the European economy and its single currency is more likely to be decided on the streets.
Gideon Rachman, FT October 18 2010

Inget krav på att höja avgifter i bostadsrättsföreningar
Bokföringsnämndens beslut tidigare i år att förbjuda progressiv avskrivning behöver inte leda till avgiftshöjningar.
God framförhållning inför framtida underhållskostnader kommer dock även fortsättningsvis att vara ett centralt krav
FAR 2014-09-19

The yield on Greece’s 10-year bonds – the benchmark rate at which Athens can borrow money from financial markets –
had moved from 7 per cent to almost 9 per cent.
Financial Times 16 October 2014

Remember Europe?
You know — the place with the common currency that almost fell apart two years ago because of trouble in Greece,
prolonged recession and fighting among political leaders over the best way out of the mess.
Until a few days ago, international investors seemed to have forgotten that there was ever anything wrong on the Continent,
as they lined up to buy bonds from Spain, Italy and even Greece
New York Times 16 October 2014

A “sizeable” number of them, he observed, probably presumed that they could exit their positions before any sell-off.
“History tells us that this is generally not a successful strategy,” he warned.
“The exits tend to get jammed unexpectedly and rapidly.”
Gillian Tett, FT October 16, 2014

Systems flooded with cash can sometimes freeze.
Having lots of money in the system does not guarantee that funding will flow freely
Gillian Tett, FT October 16, 2014

Forward-looking credit swaps already suggest that
Fed will not be able to raise interest rates next year, or the year after, or ever, one might say.
Put another way, it is possible that the world economy is so damaged that it needs permanent QE just to keep the show on the road.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 15 October 2014

Stocks might be off their peak for the year, but there are no fundamental problems
MarketWatch Published: Oct 15, 2014 8:48 a.m. ET

The shadow banking system was at the heart of the financial crisis.
Preventing a re-run of this spiral has been a central goal of lawmakers and regulators since 2008.
Financial Times editorial 14 October 2014

Shadow banks
One example is the operation of so-called repo markets, where banks lend to so-called shadow banks,
such as hedge funds, against the security of bonds.
BBC 14 October 2014

Critical intelligence before the U.S. market opens
MarketWatch Oct 14, 2014

En bra dag för en permabjörn - Men det gäller att välja rätt tidsperiod för sitt diagram.
Rolf Englund blog 14 oktober 2014

A good day for a permabear
Rolf Englund 14 October 2014

Överskottsmålet
Hur långt är ett snöre?
Hur lång är en konjunkturcykel?
Och var i konjunkturcykeln befinner vi oss?
Rolf Englund 7/2 2007

Utdrag ur ”Partiledaren som klev in i kylan”
Aftonbladet oktober 2014

The Ebola epidemic threatens the "very survival" of societies and could lead to failed states,
the World Health Organization (WHO) has warned.
The outbreak, has killed some 4,000 people in West Africa.
WHO head Margaret Chan warned of the cost of panic "spreading faster than the virus".
BBC 13 October 2014

Rosornas Krig
Bok av Rolf Englund, Timbro

de Vylders slutsats är dyster: i en valutaunion som EMU, då länderna utvecklas i olika takt och då hela anpassningsbördan faller på länder med urholkad internationell konkurrenskraft,
måste antingen den gemensamma valutan eller den politiska demokratin förr eller senare ge vika.

Portugal Pós-Troika??? respektive Economic Democracy? In Europe?

Ett kort referat av boken presenteras här med tonvikt på de Vylders bidrag.
En intervju på engelska med bokens redaktör Soifer kan läsas här.
Forum för EU-Debatt

Wolf och Rolf om Finanskrisen
Rolf Englund blog 10 oktober 2014

In my book The Shifts and the Shocks, I argue that pre-crisis trends
– huge global current account imbalances, rising inequality and weak propensity to invest –
had already created weak underlying demand in high-income countries.

The de facto response of policy makers was toleration, if not promotion, of credit booms.

When these collapsed, extraordinary policy easing was needed both to replace the lost demand impetus from the credit bubbles and to
offset the drag on demand from debt overhangs, predominantly in private sectors:

too many people had borrowed too much.

Martin Wolf, FT October 9, 2014

German model is ruinous for Germany, and deadly for Europe
The Hartz IV reforms – so widely praised as the foundation of German competitiveness,
and now being foisted on southern Europe – did not raise productivity
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard 8 Oct 2014

infrastructure
While a simplistic stability pact may have been the right choice when the euro was in its infancy,
Europe can no longer afford to stick with such a rudimentary instrument.
Mario Monti FT 8 October 2014

A rocky exit from low interest rates by the Federal Reserve risks
$3.8 trillion of losses to global bond portfolios,
IMF warned in its latest global financial stability report.
MarketWatch 8 October 2014

Svenska Bankföreningen, med vd Thomas Östros, vill nu vrida åt tumskruvarna ytterligare för dem med nya bostadslån.
Kravet på amortering av nya bostadslån utvidgas. Nytt mål är att beta av bolånen så att bara hälften av lånet blir kvar.
SvD Näringsliv 7 oktober 2014

First Ebola infection outside Africa as Spanish nurse contracts virus
MarketWatch Oct 7, 2014 7:09 a.m. ET
Nice pic, sort of

Why Weren’t Alarm Bells Ringing?
The Shifts and the Shocks: What We’ve Learned—and Have Still to Learn—from the Financial Crisis by Martin Wolf
Paul Krugman, New York Review of Books, October 23, 2014 Issue

Oklart när trafiken på Roslagsbanan öppnar
ABC

Grov miss av SL gör att Roslagsbanan inte går i tid
Klick

Margot Wallström, Prince-programmet och Machiavelli
Rolf Englund blog

När Wallström för sina nästa fem år i EU-kommissionen fick uppdraget att ”kommunicera EU” till medborgarna,
ett ansvarsområde som mest verkade handla om att vara unionens trevliga ansikte utåt,
så var steget inte långt till att tro att hon medvetet hölls borta från jobb där hon kan irritera europeiska nyckelindustrier för mycket.
Som kommunikationskommissionär gjorde hon inte stora avtryck i EU-politiken.
Teresa Küchler, SvD 3 oktober 2014

SSU stod enat bakom valet av Ardalan Shekarabi
sedan konkurrenten och EMU-motståndaren Lina Afvander oväntat drog tillbaka sin kandidatur
Aftonbladet 2003-08-07

Some two or three years ago, the European Central Bank (ECB) would have been seen as revolutionary and courageous,
if it had then set about buying bank debt in the form of bonds, including junk from Greece and Cyprus.
Robert Peston, BBC economics editor 2 October 2014

Since the onset of the eurozone sovereign debt crisis in 2010,
the standard pattern has been to do the right thing between six and 18 months too late,
the delay generally originating in Frankfurt or Berlin.
FT Editorial 2 October 2014

Ilargi: Europe Is Crumbling Into Collapse
Yves Smith (naked capitalism) October 2, 2014
Highly Recommended

Only a weak euro can save the ECB now
Lorenzo Bini Smaghi, FT October 2, 2014

Withdrawal of mortgage equity, financed by borrowing, has collapsed.
Martin Wolf, FT September 30, 2014

Merkel has a duty to stop Draghi’s illegal fiscal meddling
The ECB is overstepping its mandate with anti-deflationary measures
Hans-Werner Sinn, FT September 29, 2014

Surging US dollar threatens emerging markets’ carry trades
FT September 29, 2014

America’s eight biggest banks used to have 23 times more loans and investments than loss-absorbing capital
if a twenty-third of their assets had had to be written off, they would have gone bust.
Now they are only 14 times “levered”.
The Economist print September 27th 2014

Antalet asylsökande bestäms av hur många som söker asyl.
Rolf Englund blog 2014-09-29

Debt ratios in developing Asia have surpassed extremes seen just before the East Asian financial crisis blew up in the late 1990s
companies have borrowed unprecedented sums in dollars, leaving the region highly vulnerable to US monetary tightening.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 29 September 2014

Fund manager and prominent bear John Hussman is warning investors once again of the potential for a big market plunge
In the note, Hussman acknowledges that he’s proven “fallible” since 2009
MarketWatch 29 September 2014

Geneva Report warns record debt and slow growth point to crisis
Predicts interest rates across the world will have to stay low for a “very, very long” time
to enable households, companies and governments to service their debts and avoid another crash.
By Chris Giles, FT Economics Editor September 28, 2014

One of the United States’ defining – and disheartening – economic trends over the last 40 years has been
real-wage stagnation for most workers.
Median full-time male worker earned $50,033 in 2013,
barely distinguishable from the comparable (inflation-adjusted) figure of $49,678 in 1973.
Laura Tyson, Project Syndicate, 26 September 2014

After a life of trend spotting, Bill Gross missed the big shift
Gillian Tett, FT September 28, 2014

Den civiliserade Carl Bildt bildade regering med hjälp av Ny Demokratis Bert Karlsson
Rolf Englund blog 29 september 2014

There was certainly an abundance of goodwill behind the EU’s decision to launch its European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) in 2004.
Aiming to construct a “ring of friends” to its east (former communist countries) and south (across the Mediterranean), the EU took enthusiastically to the task of transforming its 16 ENP partners.
Charlemagne, The Economist print, 20 September 2014

”På riktigt lång sikt är det bara en sak som kan förklara uppgångar i tillgångspriserna och det är inkomstökningar”,
säger Roger Josefsson, Danske Banks chefsekonom för Sverige.
”Priserna ligger just nu en till två standardavvikelser högre än de borde sett till inkomstutvecklingen,
vilket skulle implicera ett prisfall på 20-30 procent.”
Dagens Industri 25 september 2014

Efter realräntechocken 1992 föll bostadsbyggandet, mätt i antalet bostäder, med 82 procent. Efter det har byggandet inte återhämtat sig.
Här har vi det förmodligen allvarligaste problemet i svensk ekonomi.
Mest har hyreshusbyggandet minskat. Det är allvarligt. För en dynamisk region behöver en spotmarknad av bostäder,
det vill säga lägenheter som inflyttande och nyutbildade personer snabbt kan komma över, utan stora kapitalinsatser.
Nils-Eric Sandberg, legendarisk ledarskribent, Byggindustrin 22 september 2014

Chockbesked:
Vice riksbankschef Karolina Ekholm flaggade på måndagen för en bostadsbubbla.
Hon pekar ut Stockholms innerstad som nästa problemområde när det gäller hushållens skuldsättning.
Rolf Englund blog 2014-09-24

Germany's Ukip threatens to paralyse eurozone rescue efforts
Alternative für Deutschland winning 12.6pc of the vote in Brandenburg and 10.6pc in Thuringia
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard (11,7k Twitterföljare), 23 September 2014

Expectations for inflation over the next five years,
as measured by comparing yields on Treasury inflation protected securities and those of nominal Treasury bonds,
have approached their double low of June 2013 and December 2011.
FT 23 September 2014

US inflation over the next five years, 1.62 per cent - Ha

How can anyone pretend to know what is happening in five years?
Rolf Englund blog 2014-09-24

There is no bond market bubble
Using the Mankiw rule to predict US monetary policy 10-years ahead
The Market Monetarist/Krugman, 20 September 2014

Don’t confuse brilliance with a bull market
I’ve noticed that many long-time bears are capitulating. If you look at market history, when bulls feel invincible and beaten-down bears give up, you have the makings of a market top.
When the Fed attempts to extricate itself from the market one day, that’s when the music stops, and the blame game begins.
MarketWatch, Michael Sincere 23 September 2014

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, especially when it comes to explaining market crashes.
The glaringly obvious guide to the next crash
James Mackintosh, FT September 21, 2014

Dietrich von Choltitz, Paris, Raoul Nordling, Gustaf V och Per Albin Hansson
Rolf Englund blog 19 september 2014

Valresultatet 2014
Klick

Jessica Rosencrantz, ursprungligen Andersson, född 1987 är moderat riksdagsledamot, suppleant i EU-nämnden.
Valaffisch 2014, Nice pic.

Cecilia Malmström. För åtta miljoner kr om året kan man väl erbjuda Kadaffi patrullbåtar så att han kan stoppa de asylsökande redan i Libyen
Rolf Englund blog 19 september 2014

Parallels to 1937
Now, as then, people have been disappointed for a long time, and many are despairing.
They are becoming more fearful for their long-term economic future.
Robert J. Shiller, a 2013 Nobel laureate in economics, Project Syndicate, 11 September 2014

Ukraine's parliament has approved a historic agreement with the European Union
that propels the former Soviet state towards the West and away from the grasp of Russia.
Parliament finally ratified an Association Agreement placing Ukraine on the path to EU membership.
Telegraph 16 September 2014

The ECB auction, which will allow banks to borrow up to €400bn in cheap, four-year loans,
comes as markets continue to doubt whether the central bank can return inflation to
its target of below but close to 2 per cent.
FT 16 September 2014

Draghi only had to say "whatever it takes" to end Europe's financial crisis.
But Draghi will actually have to do whatever it takes to end Europe's economic one.
That's what he's trying to do now, but the eurocrats might not let him.
They have their rules, after all.
Matt O'Brien, Washington Post, August 27, 2014

Ingen svensk regering har fattat beslut om invandringen Sverige har tagit emot flest asylsökande i hela EU.
Min poäng är nu att ingen regering (Persson eller Reinfeldt) någonsin har fattat beslut om att det bör bli på detta sätt.
Det har bara blivit så av bara farten.
En förklaring kan vara Sveriges självbild av välfärdsstat i basker blå med vita bussar.
Rolf Englund blog 16 september 2014

Ska fastighetsskatten återinföras?
- Absolut inte.

Bör ränteavdragen sänkas?
-Nej.
Magdalena Andersson SvD print 12 september 2014

Unemployment in the euro area
Speech by Mario Draghi, President of the ECB,
Jackson Hole, 22 August 2014

Draghi’s recent speech at the annual gathering of central bankers in Jackson Hole has excited great interest,
but the implication of his remarks is even more startling than many initially recognized.
If a eurozone breakup is to be avoided, escaping from continued recession will require increased fiscal deficits financed with ECB money.
The only question is how openly that reality will be admitted.
Adair Turner, former Chairman of the United Kingdom’s Financial Services Authority,
member of the UK’s Financial Policy Committee and the House of Lords, Project Syndicate 8 September 2014

Jag tycker det är skriande uppenbart att räntan världen över är för låg och att en större del av stimulanserna borde ske via finanspolitiken.
Rolf Englund blog 5 december 2009

Basel
Given the enormous social and economic costs when high levels of mortgage debt meet a crash in house prices,
one would expect regulators to be fully engaged on the issue.
Unfortunately, they are not.
Amit Tyagi, Vice President and Head of Group Credit Risk and Portfolio Management at the National Bank of Abu Dhabi, Project Syndicate, 9 September 2014

Katalonien vill sluta betala för Spanien
I dag är det 300-årsjubileum för Kataloniens nationaldag, och snart röstar katalanerna om självständighet.
Att bryta sig loss från Spanien ses som ett medel för att skydda regionens ekonomiska välstånd.
Jakob Lewander, understreckare SvD 11 september 2014

As Scotland prepares to vote on independence, Catalans and Spaniards are watching with a mixture of excitement and unease.
Despite cries of "illegal" from Madrid, Catalonia's top politician is committed to holding a similar vote in this Spanish region
BBC 11 September 2014

Dokument som SVT läst visar att regeringens ekonomiska politik till stor del utgår från en 40 år gammal teori som kallas jämviktsarbetslöshet.
Enligt Konjunkturinstitutet och Riksbankschefen ligger den arbetslöshetsnivån i dag på närmare sju procent.
Det visar en granskning som SVT:s Uppdrag granskning gjort.
SVT Text Onsdag 10 sep 2014

David Cameron can’t help the No campaign – he’s less popular in Scotland than Windows 8
The first rule of panic mode is you don’t talk about panic mode.
Guardian 8 September 2014

- Vi vill inte höja fastighetsskatten, och det har jag sagt i 2,5 år och det kommer att gälla i fyra år till.
Det finns ju många ekonomer som gillar fastighetsskatten, men för mig har det varit väldigt tydligt: Svenska folket gillar inte fastighetsskatten.
Då tar vi ut skatt på något annat, säger Magdalena Andersson till TT, enligt SvD 5 september 2014

What impressed me was not so much the rate cut, but that Mario Draghi, ECB president,
allowed the decision to be taken on a majority vote. Quite a few central bankers were opposed.
Wolfgang Münchau, FT September 5, 2014

The financial crises and the years of economic malaise that followed represent profound failures of the economy and of policy.
Above all, they were failures of understanding.
We have learnt much since. But we have not learnt enough to avoid a repeat of this painful experience.
As I argue in a new book, we retain unbalanced and financially fragile economies.
Martin Wolf, Financial Times, September 3, 2014

"not only too big to fail, but too big to rescue"
There is a time-honoured way of protecting taxpayers from picking up the bill for the failure of a systemically important financial institution.
It involves central banks and finance ministries pressing a better capitalised bank to absorb the ailing business through an arranged merger.
Yet it is becoming clear that this tool of crisis management can no longer be put to use,
raising questions about the authorities’ ability to stabilise the financial system in a crisis.
John Plender, FT, September 1, 2014

A Way Out for Ukraine and Russia
ANATOL LIEVEN, New York Times, SEPT. 3, 2014

Englunds fredsplan för Ukraina:
Östra Ukraina bör bli som Åland.
2014-08-31

The Greater Depression
First it was the 2007 financial crisis. Then it became the 2008 financial crisis.
Next it was the downturn of 2008-2009. Finally, in mid-2009, it was dubbed the “Great Recession.” Late 2009, the world breathed a collective a sigh of relief. We would not, it was believed, have to move on to the next label,
which would inevitably contain the dreaded D-word. But...
J. Bradford DeLong, Project Syndicate, 28 august 2014

The Stall-Speed Syndrome
Collectively, the annual growth rate in the major developed economies averaged a little less than 0.7% in the first half of 2014.
Stephen S. Roach, Project Syndicate, 27 August 2014

Basel, Stresstester och kapitaltäckningsregler
Robert Jenkins, Financial Times, August 27, 2014
Highly Recommended

Q&A: The battle over EU fiscal rules
Peter Spiegel, FT August 28, 2014

Nu är det Augusti '14
NATO hävdar sig ha bildbevis på att ryska trupper har gått in i Ukraina.
Börsen i New York har just nu sjunkit 0,18 procent.
Två böcker jag vill anbefalla till läsning
Rolf Englund blog 28 augusti 2014

"Väljarna har rätt. Partierna ger inte bra svar i bostadsfrågan",
säger Klas Eklund, ordförande i Bokriskommittén.
Dagens Industri 28 augusti 2014

Jag tycker det är skriande uppenbart att räntan världen över är för låg
och att en större del av stimulanserna borde ske via finanspolitiken.
Rolf Englund blog 28 augusti 2014

Central Banks and Market Bubbles, Ralph Atkins
Financial Times 27 August 2014 via Rolf Englund blog

Most wealth in the United States is gained from the appreciation of home values over time.
Twenty-five percent of Americans' wealth, the sum of all physical and financial assets, comes from the increased value of homes
CNN 27 August 2014

"Vi önskar kamraterna i Tysklands Socialistiska Enhetsparti och medborgarna i DDR mycken framgång i byggandet av socialismen.
Med kommunistisk hälsning, Vänsterpartiet kommunisterna. Lars Werner, ordförande.”
Det här var slutklämmen i ett hyllningsbrev som det svenska kommunistpartiet – som nu kallar sig vänstern – skrev till chefsdiktatorn i DDR Erich Honecker 4 oktober 1989.
Berlinmuren föll 36 dagar efter att kommunisterna skickat sitt hyllningsbrev till Honecker. Därefter bytte kommunisterna namn till Vänsterpartiet.
Nils-Eric Sandberg, Kristianstadsbladet 25 augusti 2014

Opinion:
/USA/ This house market is falling apart
“If sales are weakening and listings are going up substantially, prices will fall,”
MarketWatch Aug 27, 2014

Ebola outbreak:
Nigeria closes all schools until October
BBC 27 August 2014

At the external EU borders, national forces and EU border agency Frontex patrol thousands of kilometres of seas, fences and rivers at great expense.
European border police mingle with African counterparts; defence conglomerates create synergies with research outfits;
and humanitarian organisations and outsourcing groups warehouse those rescued, deported or detained.
FT 26 August 2014

Så ska forskare skapa supervaccin mot influensa
– Om man lyckas utveckla ett vaccin som ger ett bredare skydd inkluderar det även virus man inte träffat på tidigare,
däribland virus som kan komma att orsaka pandemier,
säger Hélène Englund, epidemiolog vid Folkhälsomyndigheten.
DN 26 augusti 2014

Yesterday, president François Hollande had to ask his prime minister, Manuel Valls, to form a new government
after senior ministers publicly criticised his economic strategy - Mr Hollande’s “absurd” austerity policies
Telegraph 25 August 2014

Italy’s Downward Spiral
Italy’s new prime minister, Matteo Renzi, wants to stimulate growth. But what he really intends to do is accumulate even more debt.
True, debt spurs demand; but this type of demand is artificial and short-lived.
Sustainable growth can be achieved only if Italy’s economy regains its competitiveness,
and within the eurozone there is only one way to accomplish this: by reducing the prices of its goods relative to those of its eurozone competitors.
What Italy managed in the past by devaluing the lira must now be emulated through so-called real depreciation.
Hans-Werner Sinn, Project Syndicate 21 August 2014

Prof Sims, who won the Nobel Prize in 2011 for studying "cause and effect in the macroeconomy",
says monetary policy cannot do the trick either once interest rates have dropped to zero.
He dismisses the monetary effects of quantitative easing as trivial.
At best, he says, QE is a bluff intended to show resolve and change psychology.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, August 21st, 2014

“secular stagnation”
Why inflation remains best way to avoid stagnation
Tim Harford, FT, August 21, 2014

Europe is riven, politically, but at root intellectually, between two incompatible views of what to do.
One is the conviction, spawned by the trauma of the sovereign debt crisis, that at least the 18 eurozone members must pursue much deeper integration.
The other is the belief, reinforced by the elections last May, that integration has already gone further than the public accepts.
Martin Sandbu, the economics leader writer for the Financial Times, August 24, 2014

European Banking Authority (EBA) revealed what information would be published about each bank.
The region's 124 most important banks are undergoing an assessment of their risky assets
designed to determine how well they would cope with future market shocks.
CMBC 20 August 2014

Italy’s PM Matteo Renzi wants the EU’s budgetary rules to be interpreted more loosely – so that money spent for ‘growth-enhancing’ purposes does not count as part of the budget deficit.
At a summit at the end of June, EU leaders agreed that they should make “best use” of the flexibility in the Stability and Growth Pact.
Crucially however, the rules were to remain the same.
Nevertheless Italian officials have been holding this up as a significant blow-to-austerity victory.
EU Observer 7 August 2014

How to Survive a Secular Stagnation
Mohamed A. El-Erian, AUG 19, 2014

Carl Melins och Markus Uvells nya bok ”Innerst Inne – Vad svenska folket egentligen tycker”.
Sverige. Detta extrema land är inbördes väl samlat kring mitten och är nästan tvångsmässigt konsensusinriktat.
Få länder har en så stark kärna av värderingar som omfattar så många som Sverige.
Det definierar en skarp gräns mellan det normala och det aparta, som inte förekommer i länder där det ryms två eller fler konkurrerande värderingsuppsättningar.
Det vi i Sverige anser vara olika åsikter är oftast nyanser av samma grundinställning.
Mauricio Rojas, SvD 18 augusti 2014

Too big to Fail
Global banks can no longer assume continuing access to the Federal Reserve’s discount lending window
as an element of their living wills
FT 17 August 2014

Draghi is running out of legal ways to fix the euro
The ECB should starting buying equities and junk bonds. It should subsidise mortgages and consumer credit....
All these measures would be effective. Most would be illegal.
Wolfgang Münchau, FT 17 August 2014

Var och Vart - En allvarlig fråga
SvD:s Kvalitetsredaktör Per Söderström skriver i dag den 18 augusti om det felaktiga bruket av Var och Vart.
Sakfrågan är enkel. Var är bollen? Vart skall Du gå min lilla flicka?
Rolf Englund blog 2014-08-18

“Not without treaty change.”
It’s hard to believe, but almost six years have passed since the fall of Lehman Brothers
The crisis is by no means over. Recovery is far from complete,
and the wrong policies could still turn economic weakness into a more or less permanent depression.
In fact, that’s what seems to be happening in Europe as we speak.
Paul Krugman, New York Times 14 August 2014

Does George Soros know something we don’t about the S&P 500?
Soros Fund Management increased a bear-call bet on the S&P 500 in a huge way.
The fund lifted a put position — a bet the market will go lower — to its biggest size yet,
making a 605% leap over the previous quarter.
MarketWatch 15 August 2014

Margot Wallström och Prinsen
Margot Wallström vill bli utrikesminister sägs det.
I Bryssel chefade hon bl a över Prince-programmet.
Rolf Englund blog 14 augusti 2014

Italy's Renzi must bring back the lira to end depression
Output has collapsed by 9.1pc from the peak, back to levels last seen 14 years ago. Industrial production is down to 1980 levels.
It takes spectacular policy errors to bring about such an outcome in a modern economy.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 13 Aug 2014

Uh-oh: Trouble is brewing again in the repo market
The collapse of repurchase agreements — "repos" as they are known on Wall Street — signaled the beginning of the financial crisis, and there's trouble brewing in the market again.
CNBC 13 August 2014

JPMorgan Joins Goldman in Designing Derivatives for a New Generation
Bloomberg 12 August 2014

Fischer kom närmast från posten som högste chef för Israels centralbank.
Den mest effektiva åtgärden som de vidtog för att bromsa de israeliska hushållens skuldsättning var
att begränsa hur stor del av lån som får tas med rörlig ränta.
Här hemma har riksbankschef Kerstin af Jochnick lyft samma idé, bland annat vid Riksbankens julimöte.
Louise Andrén Meiton blog, SvD Näringsliv 12 augusti 2014

For Turkey, this sorry period came to an end just after a 2001 banking crisis, when Finance Minister Kemal Dervis,
with the cooperation of the International Monetary Fund, laid the groundwork for success.
Ankara pruned back its spending, brought inflation under control, introduced a floating exchange rate,
restructured the country’s banks, and granted more independence to the central bank and regulators.
The New Turkey, December 18,2013

Independence referendum in November
Mr Pujol, who was Catalan president for 23 years until 2003,
stunned supporters last month by revealing he had kept undisclosed bank accounts outside Spain for the past 34 years.
FT 12 August 2014

Återfunnet
Tystnaden om skattereformens roll för krisen 1992 är kompakt
Åke Sundström i en replik till Rolf Englund - Finanstidningen 1999-01-27

I cannot think of a sillier approach to the problem than that suggested by Ms Admati.
Banks would shrink their balance sheets to match, with devastating consequences for the wider economy
Jeremy Warner, Telegraph 11 August 2014

30 reasons not to worry about a stock market crash
Everyone knows that bearishness is for losers
Brett Arends, MarketWatch 12 August 2014

The consumer credit market is a ticking time bomb;
it beggars belief that so many folk and companies who should know better are so relaxed about it.
Allister Heath, Telegraph 11 August 2014

EU ger oss möjlighet att lösa gränsöverskridande problem, trygga demokrati och främja frihet, underlätta ekonomisk utveckling, förbättra miljön främja mänskliga rättigheter och bekämpa brottslighet. Samarbetet i Europa gör individen friare, Sverige rikare och vår omvärld tryggare. Sverige bör delta fullt ut i det europeiska samarbetet.
Efter ett ja i en folkomröstning och när ett robust ramverk är på plats och efterlevs ska Sverige införa euron som valuta.
Folkpartiets valmanifest 2014

ROBERT SOLOW: HAYEK, FRIEDMAN, AND THE ILLUSIONS OF CONSERVATIVE ECONOMICS
Brad DeLong August 10, 2014

Banco Espirito Santo: The Angolan Story
If you thought what I described in my recent pieces on Bulgaria was corruption, just read this.....
it makes Bulgaria look like the Garden of Eden.

Honestly, I was shocked. What was supposed to be a post about the failure of the Angolan arm of BES
turned into a post about the systematic looting of Angola by its corrupt political elite.
Coppola Comment 10 August 2014

How to bring the Ukraine crisis to a peaceful end
The crisis in Ukraine has stirred ancient suspicions of Russia in the west,
and barely rational cold war passions on both sides.
Rodric Braithwaite, British ambassador to Moscow between 1988 and 1992, FT 10 August 2014

Next crash: $10 trillion like dot-com 2000? Subprime 2008
How big a drop? Truth is, nobody really knows. But everybody has an opinion.
First using this or that favorite theory, cycle, index, data, algorithm. Then they guess.
Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch 11 August 2014

Larry Summers has a new ally — Fed Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer.
Fischer says Summers could be right about secular stagnation
MarketWatch 11 August 2014

Asset-backed securities: The key to unlocking Europe's credit markets?
Bruegel 24 July 2014

Anat Admati
When bank apologists write self-serving balderdash, I shrug my shoulders and move on. Anat gets on a plane.
She said she was glad that policy makers finally seemed to be listening. But, she said, she was frustrated by the lack of progress and not sure about how to press ahead.
To the contrary, this has been one of the most successful campaigns to change ideas in economic policy, in a short time, that I have ever seen.
If you want to study how an academic economist can have a major influence on public policy, this is it.
The Grumpy Economist, 10 August 2014

Fresh evidence of how the West lured Ukraine into its orbit
The West is demonising President Putin when what set this crisis in motion were recklessly provocative moves to absorb Ukraine into the EU
Christopher Booker, Telegraph, 9 August 2014

“When the Malaysia Airlines MH17 plane went down, I was sitting there thinking: ‘Jesus, this is how world wars start’.
“I’m pretty sure it was unintended but the unintended consequences of this unintended act could have been fairly dramatic
and yet all that really happened in stock markets was that the price of gold went up. We didn’t see equity markets collapsing.”
Martin Gilbert, co-founder and chief executive of Aberdeen Asset Management, 10 August 2014

Klas Eklund, 90-talskrisen och den fasta växelkursen
Rolf Englund blog 10 augusti 2014

EU-Stat:
Compared with the population of each Member State,
the highest rates of applicants registered were recorded in Sweden
Rolf Englund blog 9 augusti 2014

Exuberance is not always ‘irrational’
Stock market continuing to hit new highs almost daily despite the appalling geopolitical disasters
Robert Shiller may or may not have deserved a Nobel Prize for his academic work on behavioral economics
but as a practical guide to investing, his approach has been thoroughly refuted by real-world experience.
Anatole Kaletsky, Reuters, 25 July 2014

The UK and US governments have warned Russia not to use humanitarian assistance as a pretext for sending troops into eastern Ukraine.
Any such intervention would be "completely unacceptable and "viewed as an invasion of Ukraine",
said the US ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power.
BBC, 8 August 2014, 20:46 GMT

Samma stund: Stocks see gains, reaping peace dividend as Ukraine tensions ease
Dow gain biggest in over 4 months
Rolf Englund blog 9 augusti 2014

Lånepengar, lönepengar och duktiga flickor Izabella Kaminska och Iren Levina
Rolf Englund blog 2014-08-09

Karta - Rysk olja via Nordsjön och Ukraina

Dragi trollar fram 850 miljarder euro - men vad säger Bundesbank och Författningsdomstolen?
ECB pumps cheap cash into the banks through the targeted long-term loan program,
which kicks in next month and which Draghi says might supply 850 billion euros ($1.1 trillion).
Next, the banks lend that cash to companies.
They then bundle the loans together into asset-backed bonds,
and sell those securities to the ECB.
Mark Gilbert, Bloomberg View 8 August 2014

The World Bank is set to join a German money market fund and Austrian life insurers in
facing losses as Austria prepares to write down the value of Hypo Alpe-Adria-Bank International AG’s junior debt.
Bloomberg 16 July 2014

The WHO Director-General accepted the Committee’s assessment and on
8 August 2014 declared the Ebola outbreak in West Africa a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC).
WHO statement 8 August 2014

Vad detta innebär för Sveriges del diskuterar Folkhälsomyndigheten och andra berörda myndigheter.
Men risken för smittspridning i Sverige bedöms fortfarande som ytterst låg
då vi har tillgång till sjukvård med möjlighet att vårda och isolera en patient under säkra former.
Folkhälsomyndigheten 8 agusti 2014

The world is at risk of another financial crash following a steep rise in asset prices,
according to Raghuram Rajan, governor of the Reserve Bank of India
– and one of the few people to have warned of the last financial crisis.
FT 7 August 2014

Draghi insisted that the eurozone’s recovery remains on track
and offered no hint that it had moved closer to embarking on broad-based asset purchases, known as quantitative easing.
He maintained that a weak recovery would continue and longer-term inflation expectations remained anchored to the central bank’s target of below but near 2 per cent.
FT 7 July 2014

"We do not view Ebola as a significant danger to the US because it is not transmitted easily,
does not spread from people who are not ill, and
because cultural norms that contribute to the spread of the disease in Africa - such as burial customs - are not a factor in the US,"
Dr Frieden of the CDC told Congress, according to his prepared remarks.
BBC 7 August 2014

EU leaders are fond of saying that there should be no more taxpayer-funded rescues.
Yet in the case of BES, they agreed to bail out depositors and senior bondholders all the same.
Which raises a question: do regulators want to end bailouts or not?
I fear that many of them still quietly subscribe to the view that bailouts are inevitable.
Sheila Bair,chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation from 2006 to 2011, FT 7 August 2014

The world's oldest surviving bank, Monte dei Paschi di Siena (MPS), has reported a bigger-than-expected loss.
The Italian bank, which has been in business since 1472, reported a second quarter loss of 179m euros (£142m),
three times the loss analysts had been expecting. It was the bank's ninth consecutive quarterly loss
BBC 7 August 2014

It Begins: Canada To Send Military Equipment To Ukraine
zerohedge 7 August 2014

Putin, NATO och marknaden
Rolf Englund blog 2014-08-07

International bond issuance, fuelled by ultra-low western interest rates, continues to swell:
Exotic issuers such as Pakistan, Zambia, Mongolia and Ecuador have successfully issued debt
Governments and companies in emerging markets have issued $796bn in debt this year,
compared with $734bn in 2013, according to Dealogic data.
FT 6 August 2014

UK house price growth has taken the multiple of average home values to
more than five times earnings for the first time since the financial crisis.
Telegraph 7 August 2014 with nice chart

The Austrian savings banks are on their own as government withdraws support for the banking system
My latest at Forbes looks at the implications of Moody's downgrade of Oesterreichische Volksbanken AG
Coppola Comment 5 AUGUST 2014

Danskarna mest skuldsatta i världen i förhållande till inkomsten.
SvD Näringsliv 1 augusti 2014

Italy is the third largest economy in the eurozone,
one that has underperformed since the single currency was established 15 years ago,
and for a decade before that.
BBC 25 February 2014

Italy shows euro zone may never have left recession
MarketWatch Aug. 6, 2014
Nice chart

If we go back to the turn of the century and look at the total growth achieved up to last year,
we find that both Germany and France have managed 15 %.
That yields an average of about 1% per year, which is not impressive.
BBC 25 February 2014

Sex miljarder 513 miljoner kr
Credit Agricole said it took a 708 million euro ($950 million) hit related to its stake in troubled Banco Espirito Santo (BES)
that nearly wiped out the third-biggest French listed bank's second-quarter net profit.
Reuters 5 August 2014

Traumatised by the way Lehman Brothers’ collapse almost brought down the financial system,
the European authorities concluded back then that every bank was systemically significant and none could be allowed to fail.
This led to the egregious /Outrageously bad; shocking/ mistake of making Irish taxpayers bail out German, French and UK investors in private Irish banks
FT Editorial August 4, 2014

The Portuguese authorities could have been tougher.
While European legislation mandating haircuts on large deposits and senior debt does not become law until January 2016,
it has already been agreed.
FT Editorial August 4, 2014

In the heat of the 1914 summer, the financial markets went into meltdown.
Crowds gathered outside the Bank of England. The London Stock Exchange shut on July 31 and stayed closed for five months.
About 50 countries experienced bank runs or market crashes. For six weeks, almost all the world’s stock exchanges were closed.
George Osborne, FT August 3, 2014

Argentine Bonds Decline as Default Triggers $1 Billion of Swaps
Bloomberg Aug 2, 2014

Bailout time? Portugal braces for the worst
CNBC Friday, 1 Aug 2014

I think it is a blunder to use sanctions to give President Putin no choice but folding or fighting.
The blunders of a century ago led to the deaths of more than 10m people, mostly young men, drawn from all over the world.
As we commemorate the outbreak of the first world war, let no one swallow the old but tenacious lie that their “sacrifice” was a necessary and noble one.
On the contrary, the war is best understood as the greatest error of modern history
Niall Ferguson FT, August 1, 2014

Banco Espírito Santo has been split into “good” and “bad” banks as part of a €4.9bn rescue
that protects taxpayers and senior creditors but leaves shareholders and junior bondholders holding only toxic assets.
FT 4 August 2014

CDS again
What Happens Now That Argentina Is in 'Selective Default'
It’s up to the International Swaps & Derivatives Association to determine whether a default has occurred.
If it does, holders of the credit default swaps are entitled to a big payment.
Business Week, July 30, 2014 with nice pic of BA

Första Världskriget - What caused this catastrophe?
Just How Likely Is Another World War?
The Atlantic 30 July 2014

Banco Espírito Santo, Portugal’s largest listed lender by assets,
has posted a first-half net loss of € 3.58 bn (33 miljarder kr)
FT 30 July 2014

Argentina defaults after last-minute talks fail
Argentina defaulted on $100bn of debt in 2001-02, at the time the largest sovereign default in history.
FT, July 31, 2014, 12:28 am

Q&A: Argentina on the brink of default
FT July 30, 2014 4:09 pm

Pimco rehires McCulley, this time as chief economist and public face
Reuters 27 May 2014

We academic economists knew what to do do deal with the financial crisis that started in 2007 and
to quickly restore normal levels of output relative to potential and of potential output growth.
But even though we knew what to do, we were not allowed to speak with one voice.
Brad DeLong, July 28, 2014

Jag tror man kan datera första världskriget till 1860-talet,
kriget Preussen/Italien – Österrike; sedan 1871 Preussens (det förenade Tysklands) förödmjukande seger över Frankrike.
Kriget kunde ha startats i september 1898, i konflikten över Fashoda mellan England och Frankrike.
Eller 1 juli 1911 när Tyskland skickade kanonbåten ”Panther” till Agadir, mot Frankrike.
Nils-Eric Sandberg, Kristianstadsbladet 30 juni 2014

OBS 1972
This stock bubble is ‘beyond 1929 and 2007,’ says John Hussman
It is easily beyond 1972 and 1987, beyond 1929 and 2007, and is now within about 15% of the 2000 extreme.
MarketWatch, July 27, 2014

If you think the human race is a bunch of idiots now, consider what happened a century ago.
A Martian might have gazed down upon Europe in 1914 and seen a peaceful, prosperous continent with a shared culture.
The English listened to Wagner, Germans savored Shakespeare, Russian aristocrats mimicked the French, Mozart and Italian opera were loved by all.
Then, Europe imploded.
The Atlantic 27 July 2014

Centralbanken i Australien menar att ökande bopriser är bra för landets byggsektor.
Rolf Englund blog 2014-07-28

Det kan bli spännande om Kiev-regeringen försöker återta Krim och Sevastopol, bas för den ryska Svarta Havs-flottan
Rolf Englund blog 2014-07-28

Europe’s banking union is set to face a challenge in Germany’s constitutional court,
a development that threatens to generate renewed uncertainty over one of the main responses to the eurozone’s financial crisis.
EU’s banking union is illegal under German law because it was created without the necessary treaty changes.
FT July 27, 2014

Secular stagnation in today's economy.
A rise in global savings and a lack of profitable and safe investment projects in advanced economies
Grégory Claeys and Zsolt Darvas, Bruegel 18th June 2014

Ebola
David Heymann, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM),
who was on-site at the first human Ebola outbreak in 1976:
"It's not rocket science to control these outbreaks but instead basic epidemiology:
infection control, hygiene practices, contact-tracing and safe burial practices"
CNN 26 July 2014

The virus detective who discovered Ebola in 1976
Peter Piot, a 27-year-old scientist and medical school graduate training as a clinical microbiologist.
BBC 17 July 2014

Calm before the storm as Europe poised to join economic war against Russia
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard July 25th, 2014

Argentina fem dagar från statsbankrutt
Före den 30 juli måste Argentina nå en uppgörelse med tvistande hedgefonder.
Men om landet betalar befarar Argentinas regering att andra obligationsinnehavare ska begära samma behandling
SvD Näringsliv 25 juli 2014

Spain
IFRS imposed a strict “incurred-loss” method, in which debt was valued at par until a borrower actually stopped paying.
One of the biggest changes between the new rules and many of the national guidelines that preceded them was
a ban on banks writing down the value of their loans in anticipation of future losses, a practice some had abused to disguise volatility in their earnings.
The Economist print 26 July 2014

UK
IMF and its Keynesian fellow-travellers were convinced that his squeeze on public spending meant that the recovery would take years to materialise.
We now know that the Chancellor was right and the IMF spectacularly wrong.
Allister Heath, Telegraph 24 July 2014

Greenspan, 88:
How to unwind the huge increase in the size of Feds balance sheet with minimal impact.
It is not going to be easy, and it is not obvious exactly how to do it.
Interview with Alan Greenspan, MarketWatch 24 July 2014

Too Big to Fail
Though the Fed was partly responsible for the regulatory failures
that led to the global economy’s near-meltdown in 2008-2009,
post-crisis reform has left it with even greater authority and more responsibility for overseeing the financial system.
Simon Johnson, Project Syndicate 24 July 2014

England, Scotland and the printing press
Without a printing press of your own the creditors can no longer be confident that the bonds will be paid in time.
Rolf Englund, 22 juli 2014

von Stauffenberg då och nu
On 20 July 1944, a 36-year-old German army officer, Col Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, arrived at a heavily guarded complex
hidden in a forest in East Prussia. His mission was to kill Adolf Hitler.
Germany's constitutional court has been handed a second complaint over the EU's Lisbon Treaty brought by... former MEP Franz Ludwig Graf Stauffenberg
Rolf Englund blog 22 juli 2014

The Butterfly Defect:
How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks, and What to do About It
by Ian Goldin and Mike Mariathasan
Review by Shawn Donnan, FT, July 20, 2014

The idea of a currency union between the UK and an independent Scotland is a “dead parrot”
Ian Davidson, the Labour chair of the committee, said there would definitely be no union: “No ifs, no buts, no fudges, no deals”. That had been firmly stated by the leadership of the UK’s three main political parties.
“The Scottish government tries to give the impression that a currency union is still a possibility. It is not. This parrot is dead.”
Financial Times 21 July 2014

ECBs Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT)
Did the German court do Europe a favour? ECJ will also not rubber-stamp the OMT – and, if it does, the legal victory will not resolve the fundamental dilemmas
The OMT programme was justified but the fiscal union question remains
Ashoka Mody, Bruegel, 15th July 2014

My father tried to kill Hitler
On 20 July 1944, a 36-year-old German army officer, Col Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg,
arrived at a heavily guarded complex hidden in a forest in East Prussia. His mission was to kill Adolf Hitler.
BBC 19 July 2014

Espirito Santo International files for creditor protection
Holding company of Portugal's second-largest bank says it can't meet its obligations
Telegraph 18 July 2014

Why We're Doomed: Interest and Debt
Charles Hugh Smith, July 15, 2014

Jean-Claude Juncker:
Over the past years, Europe suffered the worst financial and economic crisis since World War II.
via Rolf Englund blog 15 juli 2014

ECB’s chief economist Peter Praet:
“Normally, a fall in prices would be able to support purchasing power and, therefore, domestic demand. But ..."
It seems like Praet is not entirely sure about the difference between supply and demand shocks,
but let me just illustrate the dffference in two graphs
The Market Monetarist, Lars Christensen, 15 July 2014

IMF has issued a blistering attack on Europe’s authorities
“Inflation has been too low for too long.
A persistent failure to meet the inflation target could undermine central bank credibility,” said the IMF
with remarkable bluntness in its annual health report on the currency bloc.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard 14 July 2014

Gabriel Stein, from Oxford Economics, said the bar for /ECB/ QE remains very high,
whatever EU treaty law says, since it would face huge political opposition in Germany,
where the AfD anti-euro party has recently won its first seats in the European Parliament and
the press views asset purchases as the road to perdition.

The day we got EU parliamentarianism.
Juncker, how many votes did you get in the last European elections?
Peder Bonde via Rolf Englund blog 15 juli 2014

På Gripenstedts tid var Sverige ett av Europas fattigaste länder, med hungersnöd år 1868.
Utan de stora statsfinansiella underskotten hade konungariket varit mindre skuldsatt, men utan järnvägar.
Carl-Johan Westholm, Liberal Debatt nr 3, publicerad på nätet den 19 maj 2014

Infrastrukturinvesteringar har blivit det fikonlöv bakom vilket åtstramningens kolportörer
gömmer det faktum att nu även de vill stimulera ekonomin genom ökad efterfrågan.
Rolf Englund blog 15 juli 2014

"Battle raging between the world’s leading macroeconomists"
The European Central Bank has found itself caught in the crossfire
The Bank for International Settlements’ call last month has reignited the debate over how to explain – and tackle –
the financial and economic turmoil that has persisted over the past six years.
The debate is so fierce, the viewpoints so distinct, that two of the world’s leading multilateral organisations,
the BIS and the International Monetary Fund, have completely different ideas on what the ECB’s next step should be
FT Money Supply blog 14 July 2014

Varifrån fick SEB 498 miljarder?
Rolf Englund blog 2014-07-14

Aggregate Demand, Aggregate Supply, and What We Know
Paul Krugman, JULY 14, 2014

For Prof Krugman, the BIS is another example of those who have been wrong about the crisis,
but refuse to acknowledge it and have to keep on inventing new bogey men to justify their point of view.
Except that as far as I can see it's precisely the reverse.
The BIS was one of the few international bodies to come anywhere close to predicting the crisis.
Jeremy Warner, 14 July 2014

BIS chief fears fresh Lehman from worldwide debt surge
Jaime Caruana says investors are ignoring prospect of higher interest rates in the hunt for returns
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard 13 July 2014

The analytical underpinnings of the current phase of risk taking in financial markets are far from robust.
Less pleasant scenario – that of stagflation and greater financial instability.
Mohamed El-Erian, FT 14 July 2014

Lite anledning till oro kanske det finns i alla fall
Portugal’s central bank has ordered the immediate appointment of a new chief executive and other board members at Banco Espírito Santo.
The move accelerates replacement of executives from the troubled Espírito Santo family group, BES’s biggest shareholder,
with an independent management team that has no connections with Espírito Santo or the current board.
FT 14 July 2014

EU behöver inte en till tysk seger
Matteo Renzi, Italiens populäre socialdemokratiske premiärminister, har tagit över ordförande­klubban i EU
och utmanar Tyskland gällande åtstramningspolitiken.
Lycka till, säger kommentariatet, britterna förlorade nyss med 7-1.
Eller 26-2 för att använda de faktiska röstsiffrorna i rådet.
Men man ska nog inte räkna ut Matteo Renzi.
Katrine Kielos, Aftobladet 13 juli 2014

Don’t trust anyone under 61
Dagens 30-åriga börsmäklare föddes år 1984.
Man kan inte begära att dom skall ha någon egen minnesbild av vad som hände 30 år tidigare,
mellan den 11 januari 1973 och den 6 december 1974,
då Dow Jones förlorade över 45% av sitt värde.
Rolf Englund blog 2014-07-13

Summer reading: Economics
Martin Wolf picks his books of the year so far
FT, June 27, 2014

Deadliest, Rarest Form of Plague Contracted Near Denver
an airborne version that can be spread through coughing and sneezing.
He may have contracted the illness from his dog
Bloomberg, July 11, 2014 5:09 PM GMT+0200

BIS Slams the Fed
"A Controlled Collapse?"
I propose Yellen is clueless. If she had any sense, she would have acted in advance to prevent an asset bubble
or at least stall the one Bernanke had started.
The Fed is not going to attempt a controlled collapse.
Yet, a collapse is coming. It will be anything but controlled.
Mike "Mish" Shedlock, 11 July 2014

Although nobody at the time was aware, the six weeks from Sarajevo to the outbreak of the first world war
marked the end of the inaugural era of globalisation that had London and the gold standard at its heart.
There had been occasional panics, some of them serious, but the international economic order
seemed as stable and secure as the international balance of power.
It was only later in the month, after Austria delivered its ultimatum to Serbia...
The Guardian, 6 July 2014

The Coming Liquidity Crisis
What was the cause of the last crisis? Everybody points to subprime debt, but that was really just a trigger.
What happened was that everybody in the financial world became distrustful of everybody else’s balance sheet
Dylan Grice and John Mauldin 7 July 2014

Det finns ingen anledning till oro
The /Portugese/ central bank said investors had "no reason to doubt" the security of funds,
and savers had "no need to be worried".
BBC 11 July 2014

Angela Merkel
After all, the German chancellor had grown up and reached adulthood in communist East Germany and
then risen to be not only the elected leader of a united Germany but Europe’s most respected politician.
She more than others understands that the price for unification in 1990 was
Germany’s acceptance of a common currency, a project unpopular with Germans
and agreed to only after assurances that the euro would be as strong as the revered dee mark.
MarketWatch July 11, 2014

The argument between Italy and Germany asks a question at the heart of the currency’s future
Can an arrangement that will always fall well short of a textbook monetary union
be at once economically robust and politically sustainable?
Philip Stephens, FT 10 July 2014

Europe’s Debt Wish
ECB will soon have to confront the fact that structural reforms and fiscal austerity
fall far short of being a complete solution to Europe’s debt problems.
Kenneth Rogoff, Project Syndicate 7 July 2014

Fears over the health of one of Portugal’s biggest banks triggered a sell-off in Europe’s stock markets on Thursday
and sent Lisbon’s borrowing costs sharply higher
Shares in Banco Espírito Santo plunged more than 17 per cent before Portugal’s stock market regulator, the CMVM, suspended trading
FT 10 July 2014

Argentina’s Sovereign Bondage
Anne Krueger, Project Syndicate 9 July 2014

Alan Greenspan suggested home prices could not fall;
Ben Bernanke suggested the subprime mortgage market problems were contained; and
Janet Yellen argues complacency in the market is not a problem.
Axel Merk, Financial Times 9 July 2014

Conducting irreversible experiments with the only planet we have is irresponsible.
It would only be rational to refuse to do anything to mitigate the risks if we were certain the science of man-made climate change is bogus.
Since it rests on well-established science, it would be ludicrous to claim any such certainty.
Martin Wolf, Financial Times 8 July 2014

It’s not quite Creditanstalt,
the Austrian banking collapse that marked the beginning of the Great Depression, but...
It is important not to get this latest flare-up in Europe’s financial crisis out of proportion;
the historical precedents make everyone very nervous whenever Austria and banks are mentioned together in the same sentence
Jeremy Warner, Telegraph 7 July 2014

Moderaterna backade mest i sina starkaste fästen
Nice pic

Dow 17,000
Since 1929, stock-market rallies have had things in common that this one doesn’t
First, low interest rates have made other investments unattractive
Second, the investing public isn’t really buying stocks
David Weidner's WRITING ON THE WALL, July 8, 2014

Grundbultsfrågan: Hur blir S = I ???
Savings and investment, being different activities carried on by different people
Man återkommer ständigt till Keynes och Hayek. Har den ekonomiska "vetenskapen" inte kommit längre?
Rolf Englund blog 8 juli 2014

BIS
Investment by businesses is the key ingredient to cut our reliance on debt-fuelled current expenditure by consumers or the state
But there is a deeper issue to be tackled:
why does the economy have to be stimulated in artificial ways through the boosting of lending
Roger Bootle, Telegraph 6 July 2014

När EU-apparaten skapades så beslutade man att EU-kommissionen skulle vara en opolitisk, verkställande gren och
EU-parlamentet en rådgivande församling med begränsad beslutsrätt.
Teresa Küchlers blogg 24 maj 2014

Nästan tre fjärdedelar, 71 procent, av de tillfrågade hushållen tror på stigande priser
Boprisindikatorn ligger nu på 64, vilket är den högsta nivån sedan juli 2007
SvD 7 juli 2014

Ferdinando Giugliano?
Ferdinando Giugliano is the FT’s global economy news editor.
Unhappy Union: How the Euro Crisis – and Europe – Can be Fixed,
Book by John Peet and Anton La Guardia, journalists from The Economist.
Review by Ferdinando Giugliano, FT 6 July 2014
Rolf Englund blog 2014-07-07

Leonid Bershinksy weeps over the cruel world that for some reason isn’t listening to Jaime Caruana of the BIS,
who warns that we must raise interest rates now now now.
Why is this prophet so lonely? And where are the bond vigilantes?
Paul Krugman, JULY 5, 2014

Mer än var tionde ledamot i Europaparlamentet kommer nu att ha
en främlingsfientlig, ultranationalistisk och starkt EU-kritisk hållning.
En ny essäbok av DN:s Annika Ström Melin, ”Europas svaga hjärta”. Europakongressen i Haag 1948
Europarådet och Europadomstolen.
Maja Hagerman, kolumn DN 30 maj 2014

France
The effect of austerity has been to erode the tax base, leaving the budget deficit stuck at over 4pc of GDP.
France has gained remarkably little from fiscal tightening equal to 5pc of GDP over the last three years.
Undeterred, it is now pushing through extra cuts of €50bn by 2017 under the new premier Manuel Valls,
dubbed the “economic Clemenceau” for his willingness to endure casualties stoically
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 3 July 2014

Balance sheet recession
Giving the banks more money for lending is surely not the answer to a demand problem
Call them stability bonds instead of euro bonds, if that makes the idea more palatable in Berlin.
Wolfgang Munchau, FT June 29, 2014

The following quote is often misascribed to Jean Monnet — in fact it is a paraphrase of a characterization of Monnet's intentions by British Conservative Adrian Hilton:

“Europe’s nations should be guided towards the superstate without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps, each disguised as having an economic purpose, but which will eventually and irreversibly lead to federation.”
Jean Monnet

Monnet is reported to have expressed somewhat similar sentiments, but without the notion of intentional deception, saying
"Via money Europe could become political in five years" and "... the current communities should be completed by a Finance Common Market which would lead us to European economic unity.
Only then would ... the mutual commitments make it fairly easy to produce the political union which is the goal."

Click

Anders Borg avslöjade sin hittills värsta tid som finansminister
”Vi hade några dagar i början av 2009 när G7 länderna ville stoppa räddningspaketen för Lettland.
Tionde till femtonde juni 2009 höll det bokstavligen på att skita sig. Det var väldigt nära”.
Dagens Industri 2014-07-03

Ukrainas nye försvarsminister:
Lita på mig - vi kommer att hålla en segerparad i Sevastopol
SvD print s 18, 4 juli 2014

Dow passerade 8000 år 1997 och nu 17000
Rolf Englund blog 3 juli 2014

Bubblan är så stor, så stor.
Större än Du nånsin tror.
Rolf Englund blog 30 juni 2014

Real rate bonds
Here is how Bob /Robert Hetzel/describes his great idea in his book “The Monetary Policy of the Federal Reserve”:
The Market Monetarist 22 June 2014

Skall det vara så svårt att fatta att Stefan Ingves har rätt?
Rolf Englund blog 2014-07-03

For decades, economic growth in America was driven by a powerful and sustainable force: increased consumption paid for by the rising incomes for middle-class and working-class Americans. But somewhere around 1980, that model broke down.
And now, with the economy only partially healed, it seems we’re going back to the lend-and-spend economy that failed us before.
Rex Nutting, MarketWatch 27 juni 2014

Monthly US jobs growth 2007-2014
Nice chart

After 2020, all EU members will have to adopt the euro
But even at only €100 billion, the Eurozone would still need an income stream to fund such transfers.
As a body that raises taxes and debts and distributes hundreds of billions in funds,
the Eurozone treasury will need to be politically accountable to those that pay it taxes.
That will mean pan-Eurozone elections of politicians to oversee Eurozone tax-and-spend decisions.
Andrew Lilico, Telegraph 1 July 2014

I admire the Bank for International Settlements.
It takes courage to accuse its owners – the world’s main central banks – of incompetence.
Yet this is what it has done, most recently in its latest annual report.
Martin Wolf, Financial Times 1 July 2014</p>

"All in all, the report is not good news"
BIS annual report suggests that “monetary policy is testing its outer limits,” and
that advanced economies, including the U.S., need “balance sheet repair and structural reform.”
Investors should take note, as the run-up in U.S. stocks has been driven by central bank accommodation using low interest rates.
MarketWatch 1 July 2014

We must end this addiction to debt as the engine of growth
There has been no serious attempt to get to grips with the financial cycle,
which requires moving away from debt as the engine of growth
Jeremy Warner Telegraph 30 June 2014

If by a fair deal, we can agree that we are not heading, at different speeds, to the same place
– as some have assumed up to now – then there is business we can do.
David Cameron, Telegraph 29 June 2014

Angela Merkel defended the candidate she had been so lukewarm about just a few weeks ago.
She said that "ever-closer union" did not mean a one-speed Europe.
Gavin Hewitt, BBC 27 June 2014

"some malfunctions occurred and mistakes were made"
U.S. poised to impose record fine /nearly $9 billion/ on BNP Paribas
French bank expected to plead guilty to sanctions breaches
MarketWatch 30 June 2014

Argentina is expected to enter technical default for the second time in less than 15 years
as the pariah of the debt markets negotiates with creditors in the wake of a Supreme Court ruling
mandating payouts to a group of hedge funds.
MarketWatch June 30 2014

Moody’s reiterated an earlier warning about the risks in the rapid expansion of Hong Kong banks’ lending to mainland Chinese entities.
The exposure of Hong Kong to the mainland grew by 29% in 2013 to USD 297 billion)
accounting for 20% of total banking assets
MarketWatch 29 June 2014

Bubblan är så stor, så stor.
Större än Du nånsin tror.
Rolf Englund blog 30 juni 2014

Nu varnar även Swedbank för att avgifterna i många bostadsrättsföreningar är för låga.
En normalstor bostadsrättstrea kan få cirka 2 000 kronor högre månadsavgift än i dag, om föreningen har haft för små avskrivningar.
Det uppger bankens nya privatekonom Arturo Arques, som kommer att delta i flera bostadsdebatter i Almedalen.
SvD 30 juni 2014

In its annual report, Bank for International Settlements (BIS) spelled out
the risks of relying too heavily on monetary policy to stimulate the economy.
BIS warned that central banks including the Bank of England and US Federal Reserve could keep monetary policy loose for too long,
with potentially damaging consequences.
Szu Ping Chan, Telegraph 29 June 2014

Jag tycker det är skriande uppenbart att räntan världen över är för låg och att
en större del av stimulanserna borde ske via finanspolitiken.
Rolf Englund, 5 december 2009

Cameron on Juncker:
'This is a sad day for Europe'
BBC 27 June 2014

Fredrik Reinfeldt är mycket kritisk mot den nya ordningen för val av EU-kommissionens ordförande.
Det förändrar maktbalansen i EU, anser Reinfeldt.
Trots alla dessa invändningar vill Reinfeldt att Sverige ska rösta för Jean-Claude Juncker
DN 25 juni 2014

EU signs pacts with Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova
The pact - which would bind the three countries more closely to the West both economically and politically
- is at the heart of the crisis in Ukraine.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said making Ukraine choose between Russia and the EU would split it in two.
BBC 27 June 2014

Reinfeldt sade att han och Sverige kommer att stödja Jean-Claude Juncker
om en kvalificerad majoritet av de andra EU-ledarna ställer sig bakom honom.
Hade Socialdemokraterna anslutit sig till V, MP och SD, så hade Reinfeldt tvingats säga nej till Juncker och gjort Storbritannien sällskap i motståndet.
Teresa Küchler, SvD 26 juni 2014

Fredrik Reinfeldt är mycket kritisk mot den nya ordningen för val av EU-kommissionens ordförande.
Det nya systemet, där EU-parlamentet utsåg toppkandidater inför EU-valet, förändrar maktbalansen i EU, anser Reinfeldt.
Om kommissionens ordförande ska utses i kretsen av kandidater i EU-valet blir det ett väldigt begränsat urval, hävdar statsministern.
Reinfeldt tycker också att det är olyckligt om kommande ordföranden för kommissionen enbart känner lojalitet gentemot EU-parlamentet och inte till medlemsländernas regeringar.
Trots alla dessa invändningar vill Reinfeldt att Sverige ska rösta för Jean-Claude Juncker imorgon.
DN 25 juni 2014

På ytan gäller det om luxemburgaren Jean-Claude Juncker ska bli EU-kommissionens näste ordförande i höst.
Det är i sin tur ett försök av Europaparlamentet att sno åt sig makt på medlemsnationeneras bekostnad.
David Cameron säger nej, Juncker är en gammaldags superfederalist och processen ett skämt.
DN-ledare signerad Gunnar Jonsson, 26 juni 2014

Why the push to install Juncker is so damaging
John Springford, Simon Tilford, 23 June 2014
VIP Very important

BBC Peston om Juncker, euron, bankunionen och demokratin
Rolf Englund blog 26 juni 2014

Low interest rates ‘ruining’ insurers
FT June 24, 2014

Argentina har lånat i utländsk valuta
Things sometimes go wrong. Sometimes this is due to bad luck and sometimes to irresponsibility.
But society needs a way to allow people to start over again. This is why we have bankruptcy.
The eurozone has put its members in the same position: for each government, the euro is close to being a foreign currency.
Martin Wolf, 24 June 2014

Ett land som går med i EMU får lämna ifrån sig inte bara sin valutareserv utan även sin sedelpress.
Ett medlemsland i EMU blir som vilken låntagare som helst.
Som Göteborgs kommun, Fastighetsaktiebolaget Hufvudstaden, AB Näckebro, Gävleborgs landsting eller Åre Kommun.
Rolf Englund på Internet 1997-04-22

Usually, it is countries with a history of fiscal irresponsibility that find themselves obliged to borrow in foreign currencies.
The eurozone has put its members in the same position: for each government, the euro is close to being a foreign currency.
When the costs of servicing such debts become too high, then restructuring – default – becomes necessary.

A better way must now be found.

Has the beginning of the end of the bull market begun?
Unless corporate profitability has reached some kind of permanently high plateau,
the recent drop is just the beginning of a much bigger decline.
MarketWatch 25 June 2014

Conventional wisdom has it natural interest rates have fallen
With debt in the developed world standing at higher levels than before the financial crisis,
one of the more disturbing threats to financial stability is an unexpectedly sharp rise in global interest rates.
John Plender, Financial Times June 24, 2014

Finland, EMU och Carl B Hamilton, Rolf Englund blog

Europe's half a banking union
- but the half that has been undertaken will be transformative and positive for the European Union
Adam Posen and Nicolas Véron, Bruegel, 20th June 2014

Matteo Renzi is rubbing shoulders with the likes of Barack Obama at G7 summits, and is
emerging as the biggest counterweight to German Chancellor Angela Merkel on the EU political landscape.
John Mauldin 23 June 2014

Finland’s economy has not grown in five years. The unemployment rate is 9 per cent.
The flagship company, Nokia, was forced to sell its handset business to Microsoft last year.
Its shipyards are in trouble; its forestry companies are cutting costs and closing plants.
Public expenditure is expected to reach 58 per cent of gross domestic product this year – a larger share of output even than France.
Its middle class pays one of the highest income tax rates in Europe. Its public debt is growing.
And matters will only worsen: the Finnish population is ageing faster than that of any other European country.
Risto Penttila, chief executive of the Finnish chamber of commerce, Financial Times 23 June 2014

Nej-sidans argumentation blir alltmera besynnerlig.
Låt oss följa Finlands exempel den 14 september!
Carl B Hamilton Dagens Industri 16/5 2003

Ebola outbreak in west Africa ‘out of control’, warns aid group
Javier Blas, Africa Editor, Financial Times June 23, 2014

Reinfeldt, Cameron, Merkel och Juncker - an “irreversible step” RE blog

The International Monetary Fund pointed out this month that housing can do a lot of damage.
An increase in prices provides an initial spur to the wider economy: construction activity is boosted and homeowners grow richer.
But as a boom continues, leverage grows and price rises become unsustainable.
The bursting of a bubble devastates bank balance sheets and leaves behind an economy that must painfully reallocate productive resources from a bloated construction industry to other sectors.
Mark Schieritz, economics correspondent of Die Zeit, Financial Times June 22, 2014

Jag är inte ensam
- I argued in 2003 that the housing market was becoming dangerously over-valued and that
at some point average prices would fall by about 20pc.
I made my prediction too early.
Roger Bootle, 15 June 2014

One of the more important insights about the state of the European economy
In their magnificent book House of Debt, Atif Mian and Amir Sufi find that
what is outwardly disguised as a credit crunch is in reality a fall in demand for loans.
Their analysis lends credence to the idea of a balance sheet recession
Wolfgang Münchau, FT 15 June 2014