Why not let the accused also sit in the jury box? The answer seems rather obvious. While maybe the truly honest man accused of a crime he did commit would vote for his own conviction, the world seems a bit short on supply of those while long and deep offering up practitioners of pure sophistry in their stead.These others when [...]
Maybe it was a sign of things to come, a warning how it wasn’t going to go as planned. Then again, when it comes to something like quantitative easing there really is no plan. Other than to make it sound like there is one, that’s really the whole idea. Not what it really is and what it actually does, to [...]
If Brazilian central bankers are the standard for illicit shamelessness, their European counterparts are at least on the same spectrum. At the end of April, the European Central Bank’s President Mario Draghi took his shot at purposeful mischaracterization. Speaking to the press after the ECB’s Governing Council meeting had concluded, Draghi had been forced to concede there had been at [...]
It’s not that curves are flattening. It’s where they are. There’s really no mystery surrounding any of this. The “conundrum” arrives only when starting from the orthodox perspective; the one derived from Economists even though they don’t understand the bond market in the slightest. Short-term rates tend to “obey” central bank signals because central banks offer more direct money alternatives. [...]
Everyone is now a euro watcher. The European common currency’s exchange value against the dollar has been on the rise, to put it mildly. Despite decades of declaring floating currencies the optimal framework, it really is quite entertaining to watch the furor when these things actually float one way or the other. This recent trend has been attributed to the [...]
It is like a great many things forgotten now, but five years ago today the head of the ECB compared Europe to a bumblebee. That’s not quite right, however, as Mario Draghi really said the euro was like a bumblebee, but you’d be forgiven for mixing the two up. The purpose of his folksy analogy was so that Europe and [...]
Europe is as we all are. Ben Bernanke wrote a few years ago that his tenure at the Fed must have been a success in his view because the US economy didn’t perform as badly as Europe’s. As usual, this technically true comparison is for any meaningful purpose irrelevant. For one, the European economy underperformed before 2008, too. Second, after [...]
At the end of March, the European Central Bank (ECB) offered a second round of bank financing. Dubbed TLTRO’s, T for “targeted”, the program offered banks a chance to obtain direct funding for up to four years at an incredibly low rate. European banks in TLTRO2 were allowed up to as much as 30% of their outstanding eligible loan books [...]
It wasn’t the introduction of statistics that led to the dire state of “science”, rather it was the jettison of common sense in favor of, and the total deference to, statistics. This was not a single event or a clean break, of course, as it happened slowly over decades. But in the 21st century what is often talked about and [...]
Unilever is a rather typical multinational conglomerate trying to weather this “recovery” as best as it can. It is, of course, quite jarring to realize that any business so positioned might have to “weather” any recovery, but that is the state that they are presented with. Reporting Q1 results last week, the company improved slightly to almost 5% in underlying [...]
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