When their paper came out in January 2010, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff put a number on bond vigilantism as it had been known in prior history. The idea behind investor fickleness was simple and intuitive: profligate governments who finance their ill spending ways by borrowing will literally end up paying the price once the exceed common sense. And when [...]
It certainly does feel like 2014 all over again, at least in terms of sentiment and the air of a carefree attitude. There are dramatic differences, of course, but with regard to emotion there truly doesn’t seem to be much daylight between now and three years ago. All that was left to cap the comparison was for Greece to take [...]
Recognizing the danger of overdoing it on Greece today, I think there is another important and complimentary factor that the uncertainty about default there is revealing. In addition to the economic re-awakening about how nothing much has really changed with Greece, including its fiscal impediments that endure despite its default three years ago, the financial theme that has provided such [...]
I’m not sure how much this can pass for shared wisdom, but somehow central bankers have become concerned about central bankers. This situation has been described and discussed ad nauseam since Japan first went full ZIRP in 1999. For all that supposed self-reflection, nothing has really changed except the rhetoric – and only recently. “This is a world which places [...]
To say that Greece is an economic and fiscal mess is to be repetitive. While the imprint of victimization stains much of the economic collapse, it is at least somewhat strongly applicable in the reminder that financialism is a huge strain in the long run. As with nearly everything European since last summer, the whispers run toward recovery even in [...]
Last November, the Spanish government withdrew €4 billion from the state’s Social Security reserve fund to pay pension obligations. That followed a €3 billion withdrawal just two months before, in September 2012, to cover “unspecified” needs at the Spanish treasury. It was also disclosed that the Social Security fund had allocated over 90%, about €65 billion, into Spanish sovereign debt. [...]
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