Negative rates: an economic curse?
November 6, 2019Companies that don’t pay interests on their debt are a like these students who never sit an exam: they somehow scrape by without any notable successes or accomplishments. The current level of rates should be encouraging investment because companies’ margins are much higher than the cost of capital, that is itself negligible. Even the…
Economists: can we trust them?
October 28, 2019Chile is the only Latin American country that is a member of the OECD, and not long ago it was still being cited as an example to follow because of its success and economic recovery. It is, however, just the latest victim to date of a neoliberalism whose ravages have now become universal. Chile’s fall…
Inflation of prices, deflation of policies
October 10, 2019So you think you understand inflation? Allow me to correct you because it is in no way the result of an unreasonable expansion of the money supply that translates into a rise in prices. This clichéd term of “inflation”, used unscrupulously by the detractors of central banks, by the prophets of misfortune whose commercial stock…
Lebanon: how can it avoid self-destruction?
October 1, 2019I just got back from Lebanon, a country that I know well and where I was born, where the atmosphere is now as palpable as it was during the dark days of the civil war. Admittedly, it’s not the armed conflicts that threaten, though this nation remains a hostage – often consentingly – to…
The economic deficiencies of our political leaders
September 17, 2019The “Japanisation” of our Western economies that I have been talking about and describing for years has now reached its climax with the world’s two most influential central banks – the ECB and the Fed – getting (back) out the heavy artillery in the hope of putting more pressure on their interest rates. The heated…
The People against the Economists
September 9, 2019In his time, Franklin Delano Roosevelt dismissed John Maynard Keynes, one of the most influential and brilliant economists of the 20th century, who was labelled an “unorthodox mathematician” by this president. In his farewell address, Eisenhower had warned his citizens against the technocrats in power, the same who were recently described by Emmanuel Macron…
Compliance, Banks in a changing world
September 3, 2019The rise to power of compliance departments in banks can be explained by the fines imposed by regulators and Western, mainly American, judiciaries. After the 9/11 attacks, after the “Patriot Act”, and after the US sanctions on Iran, Russia, certain Mexican agents and anyone who the US unilaterally and in an instant decries as…
Italy: how to decimate a country in less than 20 years
July 26, 2019In 1960, Italy’s GDP was 15% smaller than France’s, and 27% lower than the average of Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and France’s combined. However, this country enjoyed steady growth until the start of the 1990s as Italian household income caught up with the period’s norm for the other eurozone nations, so much so that…
Central banker: extinction of the species
July 9, 2019“Of course our central bank is independent”, the Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, pretty much just declared, just before dismissing by presidential decree (on 7th July) the boss of Turkey’s central bank, Murat Cetinkaya, stating that “a central bank cannot ignore the signals sent by the President”. It was in the last century and…
Have populists become conservatives ?
June 29, 2019There was a time when “populism” was synonymous with governmental financial mismanagement and irresponsibility. Far exceeding budget constraints, the leaders of these groups and realms of thought would empty the public treasury, use up reserves and bring about monetary crises, inflation, capital outflows, recession and even payment defaults. In short, the reigning populists’ disdain…
Finance: at the heart of the climate emergency
June 18, 2019The UK is hoping to achieve climate neutrality by 2050. However, one of the important drivers that will help overcome the greatest challenge of our time – climate change – is outside governmental control. A nation cannot claim to be substantially reducing its greenhouse emissions without first regulating the flow of liquidity channelled towards…
The Monetary Theory (MMT) that has nothing Modern about it
June 11, 2019I’ve been writing it since 2010. I’ve released several books and hundreds of articles meticulously defending the position. Sovereign States – that being those who issue their own currency independently of any indexation – should learn to love, or at the very least live with, their public deficits. Because a nation that controls its…
China is quietly quaking in its boots
June 5, 2019Is China on the brink of a crisis similar to the one suffered last year by Argentina, due to a defective balance of payments? In such a situation, China would see itself short on dollars, unable to support its own currency! As for many other sovereign nations, the Yuan is built on its country’s…
Back to the deutschemark ?
May 28, 2019Martin Feldstein, a Harvard economist, wrote premonitorily in 1997 that the euro’s introduction “would exacerbate economic cycles by worsening unemployment in certain member states. Such economic woes would contribute to a crisis of confidence in the Union”. In fact, those who were convinced that the Union’s crisis since 2009 would only be a one-off…
The trade war won’t happen!
May 21, 2019China is not a bellicose nation. For it, war is a matter of developing excessive trading relationships. Put another way, for China,the defence of its economic interests is an extension of war. As for its nuclear option in the context of this trade war with the USA, it would be to shed itself of…
Europe’s disgust
May 15, 2019Brexit could have been a simple divorce between the UK and Europe, but the mounting tension between the British Parliament and the European Union is about to turn this separation into a much more deeply profound event. This is because Brexit won’t just have major geopolitical ramifications in modern history. In fact, after France’s…
The zombies of capitalism
May 9, 2019The policy of zero interest rates was crucial in avoiding total financial collapse following the subprime crisis, the credit crunch, and Europe’s sovereign debt psychodrama, just as it will play a major role over the next few episodes of stock market crashes and exacerbated volatility that hurts the real economy. On the other side of…
A major challenge of our time
April 21, 2019Where has inflation gone? While the US enjoys one of its longest periods of economic expansion, and while it is pretty much at full employment with its best figures for fifty years, inflation is nevertheless miniscule. Will it one day make its return to our developed nations of integrated economies?
The Rome syndrome
April 11, 2019The Italians were, for centuries, Europe’s bankers. The Medici’s, for their part, lent extensively to the British and French crowns. Let us not forgetthe marriage – of convenience – between Henry IV and Marie de Medicis, who was also known as “the fat banker’s daughter”. What happened in the second half of the 20th…
Gold, Conservatives and Conspiracy Theory
April 2, 2019Stephen Moore, who was appointed by Donald Trump to the board of governors of the US Federal Reserve, is one of those who sees gold as the ultimate refuge. He has just stated that yellow metal prices are expected to rise to $ 2,000 an ounce and that any prudent investor should maintain a…
Brexit is a chance for Europe
March 26, 2019The chaos that’s shaking Britain to its core has come a long distance. The constitutional crisis, the 2 million protesters in the streets of London on Saturday 23rd March, the likely fall of Theresa May this week, and even the 2016 referendum itself are merely the culmination of more than 40 years of turbulence between…
Debt, money, sin
March 20, 2019The word for ‘debt’ in German – to owe money – is ‘Schuld’, and it also means ‘sin’ in this language. This dual meaning also existed in Akkadian in Babylon. In fact, it’s a Babylonian sovereign, Hammurabi, who in 1792 BC was the first to set up a veritable system of debt-renouncement that entailed…
To cleanse Europe, dismantle the Stability Pact!
March 12, 2019Europe’s not out of danger yet. A meltdown is still on the cards due to the eurozone members’ lack of any control over their interest rates and currency. In fact, in these conditions, how can diverse national economies using the euro not diverge? And what would be the instrument that could harmonise consumption and economic…
The future of Europe is going through a rehabilitation of its experts
March 4, 2019Growth since 2009: China +139%, India +96%, the US +34%, Europe –2%. These figures tell the story of the European Union’s spiralling macroeconomic decline. The lack of reactivity of our public policies, in the aftermath of the financial crisis, led to a reduction in imports, with the most hard-hit eurozone countries seeing their balance of…
German ordoliberalism versus French Etatism
February 20, 2019If a referendum was to be organised in France off the back of a widescale national debate, and if President Macron really wanted to bring the country closer to a politics that clearly favoured growth and therefore buying power, the vote would have to centre around EU regulations on public deficits and on changing the…
What the Ghosn affair tells us about Japan’s judicial system
January 28, 2019It was a mere fifty days that Carlos Ghosn had been detained, starting 19th November 2018, when he was finally allowed to appear – at his request! – before the Court in Tokyo on 8th January 2019, chained to a policeman by the waist and wearing green plastic sandals. Eight weeks had to pass for…
BOB = Bored of Brexit
January 22, 2019As“Brexit fatigue”takes hold of us, let’s look back over the terminology relating to it. While “soft Brexit” means the UK staying in the single market according to the “Norway model”, “hard Brexit” means exiting the EU with no agreement in place but then signing a trade deal, known as the “Canada model”. However, it’s only…
Would the West accept being saved by Islamic finance?
January 19, 2019The Nobel prize winner for economics, Eugene Fama, born in 1939 and one of the fathers of monetarism and the neoliberal ideology, is known for having pre-emptively asserted that “the idea of efficient markets is a simple assertion that states that the prices of securities and assets reflect all the information known”. It is in…
The US: a rate cut to come ?
January 5, 2019The US Federal Reserve, as we know, is in the process of “normalising” its monetary policy stance. That means it’s committed to gradually raising its guideline rates, after the extreme efforts during the finance crisis that led to quantitative easing. After increasing its rates four times in 2018, it has just announced two or three…
Brexit is populist – and farewell 2018!
December 21, 20182018 wasn’t a vintage year. In fact, I’d be more tempted to call it a year of gloom and doom. Trade wars, stalling stock markets, extreme oil price volatility, geopolitical tensions, con games in the Middle East, and serious questions about Macron’s presidency that had brought some much hope are only a few examples of…
Saudi Arabia is no longer ‘too big to fail’
December 5, 2018Is Saudi Arabia still an important partner to the US? The question answers itself, at least partially, with the Middle East having drastically changed since the strategic and fundamental alliance made in 1943 by President Franklin Roosevelt and King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud. It’s now a distant time when FDR boldly, vociferously claimed that “the defence…
The cabal against Carlos Ghosn
November 21, 2018Carlos Ghosn’s deposition? This is in no way a legal matter, and even less so a penal one: it’s rather a palatial revolution. Nissan is profiting from crime, mainly its CEO Hiroto Saikawa, who struggled to hide his joy at dethroning Ghosn after nineteen years of sole reign over not just the companies that he…
USA 0 China 1
November 19, 2018China is about to win the first leg of the trade war against the US. The latest statistics are actually shocking for the US Government, with the trade deficit with China at its highest historical level. These figures – that show a Chinese surplus of more than 37 billion dollars for the month of September,…
A precarious euro in a Europe with no ambition
November 8, 2018The dollar has been an integral part of America’s foreign policy for decades. Much more than the currency of reference for global trade, greatly surpassing the privileged status of reserve currency for the central banks, the Greenback is the supreme arbiter. With the simple press of a button, the US can refuse access for any…
Welcome to the worst of worlds
October 31, 2018How could we not recall the British cult TV series from the ‘60s, The Prisoner, where a giant bubble frantically pursued the hero played by Patrick McGoohan? Our world now finds itself in a similar situation: we are all hostages to the now-plentiful bubbles, and not only the speculative bubbles that infect our markets. It’s…
Keynes’s shadow is looming over Brexit
October 27, 2018“When the facts change, I change my mind”: this was one of Keynes’s maxims that became an established way of thinking. What would his attitude to Brexit have been? For or against it, he would nonetheless have been part of the negotiations to try and extract the best agreement possible, despite the strongly unfavourable conditions…
1929, 2008, and 2019?
October 9, 2018Why get worried about exaggerations – aberrations even – over current stock market prices when the American index of reference, the S&P 500, is only showing drops in the way of 1%? While US public debt is reaching astronomical heights of nearly 22 trillion dollars and while companies listed on this S&P 500 index have…
Longing for a lie-in
October 2, 2018Employment is not an end in itself. It just allows us to subsist. This is why it’s productive jobs we need today: ones that will allow us to consume goods and services produced with minimal human labour or effort involved. In my opinion, economic development and prosperity should above all tend to gradually reduce the…
Trade war, or American self-sabotage?
September 26, 2018Donald Trump is actively preparing phase 3 of his retaliation plan against China now that the latter has just reacted to his last wave that came into force this week. According to his own statements summarising his approach to China, he began by imposing an extra tax of 50 billion dollars on the country for…
Has capitalism become obscene ?
September 20, 2018Wealth and income distribution have become grotesque in our Western nations. Collusion between political and economic powers has now become obvious, and it is of public notoriety that employment is nothing more than an adjustable variable in today’s capitalism. The tacit and consensual agreement on which our prosperity has been built thus far is crumbling…
Iran is losing but it is far from checkmate
September 12, 2018Has the Iranian rial lost more than half of its value against the dollar since the start of this year? It’s routine for this country’s economy that has seen this same thing other times as, since the end of the Iraq war, each Iranian president has effectively been faced with a monetary crisis. From 1989…
Saudi Arabia is losing what’s left of its credibility
September 4, 2018The Saudis’ decision to suspend indefinitely the sensationally announced sale of 5% of the national oil company, Aramco, has called the credibility of the Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, directly into question. The offering of this giant on the stock market was in fact the cornerstone of the Prince’s politics, hoping to diversify his Kingdom’s…
Desperately seeking $ !
August 28, 2018Since last January, interest rate hikes have accelerated throughout the world. It’s simple: we might have returned to the pre-Lehman average rate level, according to a Bank of America Merrill Lynch study! It’s not surprising that, in such a situation, global cash is drying up internationally since it goes without saying that such a tightening…
Are we all complicit in globalisation?
June 25, 2018Milton Friedman maintained the theory that unfettered free trade would generate – in the long term – a wealth that would trickle down over everyone. Contrary to the ideas made out, the liberalisation of trade (which goes hand in hand with the free circulation of capital) is not the only reason for the world’s dramatic…
If only we were all Japanese!
June 17, 2018Japan is known as much for its smartphones and robots as it is for the implosion of its real estate mega bubble nearly twenty years before the subprime crisis in the US in 2007, which itself preceded the collapse of the Spanish and Irish real estate markets in 2009. In fact, the Japanese financial and…
Make America 1929 Again
June 5, 2018During his election campaign, Trump never stopped waxing lyrical about China who he stigmatised for all types of wrongdoing, citing high levels of damage to American interests due to unfair business practices. However, a year after being elected, it’s against his closest allies – Canada and Europe – that Trump is raging, all the while…
Europe is sick with Germany
May 28, 2018My intention here is not to fall into caricaturisation or outrage, but Germany is now being governed a bit like Ceausescu’s Romania. Just before being overthrown, he managed to run up a surplus in the way of 9 billion dollars on his country’s balance of payments, just like how Olaf Scholz, the new German Minister…
Qatar & Saudi Arabia: a cold peace
April 22, 2018According to statements made by the then President of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh, “Qatar has too much money”. In fact, only the insiders were familiar with this Emirate prior to the 1990s, even though the little State has distinguished itself as the richest in the world per capita thanks to the proliferation of its oil…
German prosperity: a nightmare for 40% of its citizens
April 12, 2018The German economic miracle has its dark side, demonstrated by a massive budget surplus of 1.2% of GDP – that being 38.2 billion euros in 2017 – that’s causing the country’s infrastructure to tumble, which is now the worst infrastructure of all the rich and industrialised nations. Germany’s disproportionate public saving is causing under-investment within…