Italy is threatening us with another time bomb. The country’s banks have 360 billion euros of doubtful loans and the EU (that is to say the sinister Eurogroup), as intelligent as ever, is pressuring for the bail-in rules, to which ultraliberal & co are so addicted, to be implemented by the book.
The Social Security’s pensions fund is emptying. And this is causing huge alarm amongst current and future pensioners who believe, incorrectly, that “there’s going to be no money left and one day they’ll tell us that there is no monthly payment.”
In the next quarter and the following one, we will obviously see an uptick in growth because of the tourist season. But after that, we will see a more marked slowdown, for a variety of reasons, with the first one being the impact of Brexit. But if this is going to lead to recession, I don’t know. I don’t have a crystal ball, but I don’t rule it out.
The anti-Brexit supporters continue to fire a battery of the most dire predictions, without there really being any reliable information or models on which to form such precise and one directional forecasts. Furthermore, they are shooting themselves in the foot because Brexit is irreversible.
Miguel Navascués | There are people who still believe the markets are efficient. When I say people, I mean a lot of people. Some of them unwittingly, of course. But the “progressive” academics, those who theorise about the matter, they believe in it consciously and defend it militantly. Its greatest defender is Eugene Fama, who won a Nobel Prize for Economy for this just a few years ago. The only thing to say is that Eugene believes that the 2008 financial crisis demonstrated the efficiency of the markets.
With one day to go to the referendum, the Brexit flame looks like its going out: the polls have completely turned around since the murder of MP Jo Cox. In the two previous weeks, it looked as if the rise in the polls in favour of the Brexit camp was going to be unstoppable and the markets did not stop showing their concern.
Larry Summers has written a perceptive analysis about the Fed’s confusion (and that of all the central banks, by the way) over what they are doing. Last Wednesday he made a brief reference to the FOMC’s decision not to raise rates, with the Fed once again being forced to withdraw from its previous plan of action. The total failure of ‘forward guidance,’ which has only served to make the Fed’s prose even more tedious to hide their misgivings.
The thesis is reasonable and well-known: greater growth, lower deficit. But what happened in 2015 seems to corroborate another idea: a larger deficit (-5%) fuels the biggest growth in Europe (3.2%). So the government unilaterally raises the 2016 deficit target from 2.8% to 3.6%, while Brussels is going for 3.9%.
I said it a short time ago: the institutional campaign against the UK referendum on June 23rd has been embarrassing. From Her Majesty’s government to that of the EU, the Bank of England (clearly overstepping its line of duty), and including the vailed threats that the world was going to end and Great Britain would fall into a chasm in history.
There is recurrent talk about Helicopter Money, a concept conceived by Friedman to revive the economy. This kind of monetary policy is very often referered to as special, beyond the frontiers of accounting, as if a central bank could actually get into a helicopter every day and drop bills from the sky “ex nihilo,” out of nothing. But as Cullen Roche explains, HM is not special.