The Financial Times – Finance chiefs urge action on bubble fear A group of leading financial executives have urged authorities around the world to bolster their crisis-busting arsenals amid fears that ultra-low interest rates have increased the risks of financial instability. The heads of companies including HSBC, UBS and BlackRock will on Monday release a… Continue reading A Buzz Phrase Of The Past: Macroprudential Policy
MoneyBeat – Oil Prices: Where Next? Here Are the Forecasts What’s next for oil prices? After rallying by about 40% since their lows earlier this year, forecasts now by major banks paint a mixed picture but one that increasingly looks like a W-shaped recovery. The average forecast in a MoneyBeat survey of 10 banks is… Continue reading Predicting Crude Oil Prices
The Financial Times – What to make of the new “Juncker Plan” for Greece? According to the To Vima report, the plan envisions a deal with Greece that completely cuts out the International Monetary Fund and releases about €5bn in aid to Athens from three different sources: the €1.8bn remaining in the EU’s portion of… Continue reading More On Greece
<Click on chart for larger image> Bloomberg View – Noah Smith: Will the U.S. Ever Grow Fast Again? First, Cowen posits that some sort of deep, underlying shift has permanently lowered our economic potential. But has it lowered the level of gross domestic product, or its trend growth rate? This isn’t made clear. The latter… Continue reading The New Normal
The New York Times – Wall Street Is Back, Almost as Big as Ever This time, Wall Street has largely returned to a state more reminiscent of the go-go 2000s than of the middle decades of the 20th century. Average pay per full-time worker in the securities industry averaged 2.2 times that of the average… Continue reading Wall Street Jobs As A Percentage Of The Work Force
The Financial Times – European Central Bank steps up pace of bond buying The euro came under heavy pressure on Tuesday and traders bought into the region’s sovereign debt after the European Central Bank pledged to increase its stimulus spending in May and June. Benoît Cœuré, an executive board member of the ECB, said the… Continue reading The ECB To Increase QE
Bloomberg Business – Global Jobs Gap Costs $1.2 Trillion in Lost Wages Some 61 million fewer people were employed in 2014 than there would have been had pre-crisis employment growth trends continued The global financial crisis of 2008-10 had a big impact on jobs. Employment growth has stalled at a rate of about 1.4 percent… Continue reading Lost Wages
Bloomberg Business – The $18 Trillion Global Economic Boost If Everything Went Right What if everything started to go right in the world economy? It’s a lot to ask. The 1.1 percent global growth of the first quarter was the weakest for an expansion since 1998, according to JPMorgan Chase & Co. Former U.S. Treasury… Continue reading What Happens If All Large Economies Took Off At The Same Time?
Bloomberg View – China Needs a Grown-Up Central Bank Zhou Xiaochuan is governor of the People’s Bank of China. But among some financial types, he’s earning another, less enviable title: the killer of weekends. On May 10, Zhou announced a surprise interest rate cut, forcing anyone with a stake in the Chinese economy to put… Continue reading The People’s Bank of China
None Today
The Wall Street Journal – Jon Hilsenrath: Growth Hiccups Vex Fed Yet Again A slew of recent soft economic data has fueled fresh expectations of dimmer U.S. growth, underscoring the already-anemic economy’s unusual vulnerability to even fleeting shocks. This softness—with output possibly flat for the first half of 2015—looks set to give Federal Reserve officials… Continue reading Did Hilsenrath Just Call Off The 2015 Rate Hike?
Real Time Economics (WSJ Blog) – Jon Hilsenrath: Don’t Put Too Much Weight on Atlanta Fed Growth Estimate Yet As Atlanta Fed Research Director David Altig explained in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, now is not the time to worry about the signal it is sending. The Atlanta Fed model is called GDPNow.… Continue reading A Reminder On GDPNow’s Accuracy Early In A Quarter