Government Bonds And Consumer Debt Levels Soar While Bailouts Remain The Norm! This is an excellent read from an article at City Journal! These are some of the general takeaways… Some Key Points: ‘Bailouts remain the norm worldwide’ ‘In 2008, the world’s major central banks held little more than $6 trillion in assets, according […]
(Note: This article also appears at econintersect.com) This week both the Bank of Japan and the Federal Reserve will be meeting to chart the future course of interest rates! In the U.S. where prior to the recent small interest rate hike ZIRP or zero interest rate policy had been in place, speculation over whether the Fed will raise or stand […]
Summary: State pension funds have a serious underfunding issue! It’s ZIRP but it’s more! The potential time bomb of underfunded state pension funds lurks quietly in the background, unseen and unknown by most! But like most issues that are ignored and that grow in size anyway, they don’t go away but become known only when they reach […]
Last week Fed Chair Janet Yellen decided, in the face of non-crisis level U.S. economic statistics, to leave interest rates unchanged at the economic crisis level of 0%! Her rationale was believable for some and hard to understand for others but, for anyone who listened and for those who didn’t, she mentioned non-U.S. economic factors […]
Imagine a concert venue with general admission seating, a famous band, and one small door to get inside. The result would likely be catastrophic! Is a similar scenario brewing only this time in the financial markets, bonds in particular? For the fund managers and other institutional investors who hold trillions of dollars of fixed income […]
In one sentence this is how Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase sees our financial future… ‘There will be another crisis’! Does Jamie Dimon, often held out as one of the smartest minds in banking and the financial world in general, know something that the rest of us don’t know? Or, is the handwriting on the […]
Back during the depths of the global financial crisis there was a focus by investors and politicians on the financial viability of the EU PIIGS! The PIIGS are a group of countries around Europe that for better or worse Greece is a prominent member! The concern at that time was that these countries that also […]
Question: What happens to housing when these investor’s are no longer buying? ‘The Blackstone Group LP, the world’s largest private equity firm, became the largest owner of rental homes in the U.S., acquiring 41,000 homes in the past two years. In October, Blackstone offered the first-ever “rental-home-backed” security on Wall Street. The bond is backed […]
