Global Market Commentary, Analysis and Investments
The Renaissance. The Age of Enlightenment. The Industrial Revolution. The Gilded Age. The Cold War. The Information Age.
The Bailout Age?
The printing press already has its own prominent place in history, so we’re not sure what else to call the first couple decades of the new millennium. But after this morning’s news, there’s little debate: time to fire it up!
[Read more...]Today, some 18,000 Greeks took to the streets in intense and violent protest against the new austerity measures recently launched. Greece, to lock in EU and IMF support, has instituted measures including reduced salaries for public workers, pension freezes, and increased sales tax.
Bloomberg reports that despite the presence of about 1,700 police officers, a fire started at Marfin Egnatia Bank SA spread quickly and tragically resulted in three deaths.
[Read more...]Eurostat, the European statistics office, recently reported that the Greek budget deficit is even higher than previously believed and, as a result, Greek 10-year bond yields shot up to almost 9 percent. For perspective, that’s nearly three times Germany’s rate.
This new exorbitantly high cost of refinancing Greece’s sovereign debt has forced the Greek government into a corner, and it’s now seeking to immediately activate the EU and the IMF rescue package.
[Read more...]There are those (me) who think that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is a huge load of worthless, corrupt crap, not only because their dismal record pretty much shows that they are miserable failures, but because that is the way things always end up when someone is given power and money in huge amounts, or even in moderate amounts.
[Read more...]The OMB’s 2011 budget showed that the US debt-to-GDP ratio will continue to rise over next 10 years until 2020, where the projection ends and when US debt will equal 77.2 percent of GDP.
Inflation is one strategy that could be used in an attempt to lessen that debt burden. By putting more dollars into circulation, and lessening the value of each, the feds could try to pay down the same nominal debt that would then be smaller in real, inflation-adjusted terms.
[Read more...]It looks like US banks are losing the opportunity to earn fees on the roughly $500 billion in planned European debt offerings this year. It probably shouldn’t come as a big surprise, given the less than savory details that emerged regarding Goldman’s relationship with Greece, and the series of black eyes the euro currency has been enduring as a result of sovereign debt-related instability.
[Read more...]Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke was a safe bet to win the Senate’s vote for a second term. ”Safe” is what the senators want and Bernanke passed the test. He is not a man inclined to make bold decisions. A former university administrator, his institutional mind will be just as slow to foresee the next financial crisis as it was incapable of forecasting the last.
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The Gold Rush That Greece has Ignited
Despite the debt crises facing several EU countries, governments around the world are still throwing money at the problem. In an attempt to eradicate the failure of already having spent too much, the governments are spending more. This kind of decision making undermines trust in fiat currency, ironic because by definition fiat currency is only useful when people trust it.
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