The foreclosure crisis has highlighted again a major flaw of our modern economy: the fragility of ownership and property rights in the Internet age. Quite apart from the possibility of an EMP field blanking out everybody’s servers, the sheer complexity of computer-managed structures such as securitization can make them very difficult if not impossible to […]

The Fed led by fearless Ben Bernanke has made it clear that since deflation is a significant risk and bank lending is depressed, it intends to help the banking system further by up to $1 trillion in further bond purchases. The rational investor’s response to this was clear all last week: sell banks, whose assets […]

Brazilian minister of finance Guido Mantega last week accused the major economies of starting “currency wars”. To a large extent he was trying to divert attention from his own overspending misdeeds. However this week’s decision by the Bank of Japan to enter more “quantitative easing” and Chinese premier Wen Jiabao’s aggressive response to the EU/US […]

With Brazil’s election apparently a big victory for the leftist candidate Dilma Roussef, Russia facing increasing political and economic uncertainty, India in the grip of spiraling inflation and even China’s growth prospects seeming dimmer, the great growth story of the last decade is acquiring a few dents. For the first time, it is reasonable to […]