Little by little the realization is seeping through that, provided we can agree a recovery cannot be purchased outright, there is no such thing as a recovery anywhere in the western world. Mind you, I said seeping, and I could even have said trickling; it's a slow process. And that is a direct consequence of various vested interests in producing the illusion

From yet another "gruelling" tour comes this once again highly recommended 1 hour podcast from New Zealand's GreenplanetFM radio, in which Nicole, as usual, covers a wide range of topics, with indepth analysis of issues specific to an economy like New Zealand's, a nation so dependent on trade it's dangerous, but also blessed with a ratio of resource base to population that offers possibilities many other countries do not have. For instance, New Zealand suffers from massive soil depletion because it produces huge amounts of dairy products, mainly for export to China, on land that

Amid all the superficial up and down rumblings of stocks and bonds, and hyped up analysis thereof, none of which makes you any wiser (hey, I told you Abenomics can't work..), it's a good idea to look at some of the more profound workings of the financial system. I saw an interesting take on an angle into this, even though unfortunately it was by itself also superficial.

The angle in

It's sort of funny to see a wider though still faint recognition developing in the financial world that perhaps it's true that the more stimulus is applied in today's global economies, the faster it will hit a wall. Some may finally even begin to see one or more inbuilt mechanisms at work. I personally think it all harks back to what I've long said, that stimulus by governments and central banks may have a function in certain economic cycles, but that applying it without across the board and thorough debt restructuring is a

The reactions to the $314 billion, 7.3% plunge in the Nikkei last week were, let's say, for the best part amusing. The army of experts and analysts stood at the ready to name the external factors that made it happen (by the way, that army seems to have grown a hundredfold or so over the past 5 years, or is that just me? So where's the added quality?). Some blamed it on something Bernanke did or did not

Last weekend, a group of influential British business people published a letter in the Independent which attempts to "make the economic case" for having the UK stay in the EU. The letter of course is a reaction to unrest within PM David Cameron's Conservatives (over half of Tory backbenchers demand a referendum on the topic), as well as the rise of Nigel Farage's UK Independence Party, which in recent polls is almost as big as the Tories (which trails Labor by a mile and a half). The letter raises a bevy of interesting questions, some

Throughout history and throughout the world, there have been classes of untouchables. Best known perhaps (other than Elliott Ness and Wall Street bankers) are the caste that goes by the name in South Asia, a.k.a. the Dalits, but there are/were also for instance the Cagots in France, the Burakumin in Japan, and the Roma and Jewish populations in medieval Europe though the Middle East. In the US, one could include the black and native populations. Wikipedia has this

A report came out in Britain 10 days ago that deserves more attention than it got. If only because it uses the great term "unburnable carbon", great even before it's defined. It makes me ponder the popular and somewhat crazy claims about shale and fracking leading to US energy independence, the holy grail du jour.

It promises much vaunted freedom from outsiders, but what exactly does it consist of? Does it mean the ability to burn ever more carbon-based energy sources without having to buy them abroad? And does

"The world’s leading economies acknowledged on Friday that 'further actions are required' to put the global economy on track for strong, stable and balanced growth.", writes the FT. The torture never stops. Not that we had expected it to just today.

Well, alright then, you can make a point that the biggest news in economics last week was the revelation of the errors in Rogoff and Reinhart's "debt over 90% is deadly" paper. Personally, I think what is still much bigger is the renewed revelation that actual policies executed by actual politicians have been

The Nicole Foss 2013 tour of Australia is well underway, and since I'm not there, it's a bit hard for me to write about it. But we do keep in touch on a daily basis of course, so I know things are going well, with lots of good people, good ideas and good conversations. Though I will never understand, and yes, I know I'm biased, since we've been working together for years, why every single one of Nicole's lectures doesn't attract 10,000 or more listeners and spectators. Do

A report published Thursday by the real estate industry in the Netherlands states that the average home price is now 18% lower than it was at the peak in 2008, while detached homes lost 20%-25% (March 2013 YoY prices fell 6.8%, says Eurostat). A separate, earlier, report estimated that 20% of homes, or over 1 million, are now underwater.

Today's report comes hot on the heels of a study issued Wednesday by a government commission, which took a full year to prepare and 121 pages to explain what went wrong in the Dutch housing bubble, and

Oliver Stone's 1987 film Wall Street was as much an answer to as a parody of a mind change that had pervaded the world since Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher came to power in their respective nations.

But in the upper echelons Gordon Gekko's "Greed is Good" was never truly seen as a parody, just as the message of the film was completely lost on the people it was about. And still is. It's too convenient when justifying your behavior to yourself and others, like Ayn Rand is again

Seeing Spanish and Italian bond yields drop over the past few days, it's impossible not to wonder what it is the markets, whoever they're comprised of, can't seem to figure out. Like that the Italian cloud will hang over Europe well into summer, Cyprus is falling to scandalous bits, French president Hollande is hanging on to his job for dear life because his friend and Budget minister Jerome Cahuzac was found to be an ordinary big swindler, and in Spain even the King Carlos' daughter Princess Christina is now a suspect in a financial scandal

Yeah, some things in life are inevitable. That's why it was no surprise, though still endlessly amusing, to find that while depositors of Laiki Bank (aka Cyprus Popular Bank) on the island itself have been unable to get to their money for 10 days now, Laiki's 4 branches in the UK have all that time simply remained open for business.

Which also means that richer clients in Cyprus will lose between 40% and 100% of their savings above €100,000, unless they were smart enough to fly to Britain in time and transfer

Over the past week, Europe, or rather the present EU leadership, has done damage to itself it will never be able to repair.

It seems to escape everbody, but that doesn't make it any less true: people from Portugal to Spain to Italy to Greece to Cyprus and Ireland are worse off today than they were when they first adopted the euro. Moreover, their economies are all getting worse as we speak and projected to plunge further. The once highly touted blessings of the common currency are by now lost on most of southern Europe; for

One day after it was agreed on and announced by the Eurogroup and Cyprus president Nicos Anastasiades, the deal that would turn the Eurozone into a Pandora's box like no other EU measure to date has done looks like it may never reach the finish line. The Cypriot parliament, in which freshly elected Anastasiades holds just 20 of 56 seats, has pushed a vote on the deal forward until Monday, a clear sign that the president's political adversaries will not easily be locked into an agreement that

Overnight last night, the Eurogroup (Eurozone executive committee) negotiated a deal for a bailout of the banking system in Cyprus. As part of the deal, a one-time, one-off levy on depositors was agreed: deposits below €100,000 are subject to a 6.75% levy, while those over €100,000 are subject to a 9.99% "fine".

While none of the timing is surprising late Friday, early Saturday is always the ideal time to push such measures down people's throats neither did it come as a surprise that a bank run ensued as soon as those few Cypriot banks

During the Italian election weekend two weeks ago, I watched all three Godfather films on a local station. Very convenient, since they can teach you quite a bit about Italy, even if you've seen them a dozen times already in the past. The abdication of the pope sort of rounded off the history lesson, and I was thinking: OK, now I'm good to go.

After the results came in and Beppe Grillo and the Five Star movement (M5S) became the single biggest "party", I was going to simply

The US Supreme Court heard a case on February 19 that is interesting perhaps not even so much because of the topic at hand but more because of the level of absurdity involved. It feels like we warpsped our way into a parallel universe where the laws of nature are entirely different from those on earth.

That is to say, the court should never have been in a position to hear the case, but it has created the legal space for itself, aided and abetted by Congress and the

The expansionist post war era has been characterized by the development of the FIRE economy (finance, insurance and real estate), with a greater and greater dependence on leveraged risk. A necessary consequence has been increasingly sophisticated mechanisms for operating at financially rarified levels far removed from any basis in real wealth. As the network of economic and financial connections has broadened exponentially, and become increasingly complex, greater attention had been paid to apportioning and diverting risk, and to anticipating and avoiding losses through insurance.