Britain was put on negative credit watch by Standard and Poor’s for downward re-rating from its current AAA this week. The United States, Japan and several other countries are running record deficits, yet their bond yields are still close to all-time lows. That brings up an awkward question: what happens if the global investment community, […]

Over the last thirty years, the capital markets have been restructured through the tenets of modern finance, in its various forms which together have gained six Nobel Prizes (Modigliani, Sharpe, Markowitz, Miller, Merton, Scholes) and might have generated a couple more (Fama and Black.) This has been enormously profitable for the financial services sector, which […]

Stock markets have shown clear signs of irrational exuberance in recent weeks, on evidence that the US and global economy is exhibiting “green shoots” of impending recovery. Since, while I have said several times that the economy appears to be approaching a near-term bottom, I don’t expect recovery to impend any time soon, I thought […]

The potential swine flu pandemic has emphasized once again the vulnerability of the global economy to being knocked off an even course by unexpected events, not all of which are as obviously based in past economic policy as the US housing finance disaster. Wars, epidemics, serious terrorist attacks and doubtless in the future ecological crises […]