WASHINGTON. “If there’s a debt, someone had to lend and someone had to borrow,” said in a conversation with The Corner James Robinson, former White House chief of staff and Harvard professor. Time to review the north-south narrative of the euro zone.
WASHINGTON | A troublesome unknown-unknown: how unaware are US investors of their illiteracy in financial matters? Rumsfeld, Iraq and the capital markets have something very obscure in common, says Pablo Pardo.
WASHINGTON | “Show me the factories, then!” Before the audience at the School for International Relations of the John Hopkins University, Adair Turner, or Lord Turner, put in these terms his rebuttal to those who defend that financial innovation betters the real economy, a selected group where we would find the former chief economist at JP Morgan and once FMI’s deputy managing director John Lipsky, who happens to strongly dissent…
WASHINGTON | “Capitalism without failure is like religion without sin, it does not work,” had already said Allan Meltzer in 1969. Pittsburgh's Carnegie-Mellon University teacher and author of the monumental History of the Federal Reserve is the same conservative who advised John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. Under Clinton's presidency he was in charge of a U.S. Congress committee that essentially claimed the end of the World Bank on the basis…
Universities in the US have acknowledged that they distort the employment figures of their graduates. Now, some newly graduated lawyers have begun litigation against them because, in spite of official assurances, they have been left jobless. WASHINGTON | Some U.S. lawyers have decided to file lawsuits against their Law schools. The reason? They were promised a job upon graduation but have been given none after four years of studies in addition to…
WASHINGTON | Our brains do not seem to have been made for a modern-day economy. They are much better suited for deciding among a limited —a very limited— set of options. This could make sense when we were living in caves —for several tens of thousands years, let’s not forget—, and the main selection we had to make was to pick a partner to mate with or a mammoth to take…
WASHINGTON | Second part of our conversation with Colin Fenton, global head of Commodities Research and Strategy at J.P. Morgan. What will be the effect of the closing of Iranian exports to Europe. Will it take a lot of time or effort to adapt European oil refineries to other types of oil? It always take some time to adapt, and reorientation of supply pathways, especially with trade barriers, tends to have…
WASHINGTON | Colin Fenton is the global head of Commodities Research and Strategy at J.P. Morgan. Fenton believes that there is margin for higher energy prices, with limited economic damage. Brent and WTI are behaving virtually like “two different commodities”, as one trader put it last week. Asia, tied to Brent oil, has relatively strong oil demand and limited supply, while the US is experiencing an energy production renaissance in the context…
WASHINGTON | What a coincidence. In an election year with a Democratic incumbent, Republican think tank American Enterprise Institute (AEI) releases (on January 6) an analysis headlined “Why the real U.S. unemployment is 15.6%.” The number is right… although if we count the unemployed plus the discouraged workers, those who have abandoned the job search because they know there are no jobs to search for, plus the part-time workers who…
WASHINGTON | Since it started, in January 2009, Zero Hedge has marked a new style in financial journalism. It is anonymous, and its main ‘writer’, Tyler Durden, is a character from a movie. It has an encrypted email system, so anonymous sources can send allegedly confidential documents. Its reputation among investors and regulators is more than dubious, but its popularity is beyond doubt. Its Twitter account, which portrays the bloodied…