In today’s VoxEU, Kati Suominen asks “Did global imbalances cause the crisis?, and surveys the arguments. I recently wrote a survey on the same topic for the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Financial Globalization. Here’s my take:
Category Archives: financial markets
Gold and inflation
Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke last week dismissed the suggestion that the recent surge in gold prices signals some kind of inflationary pressures:
So gold is out there, doing something different from the rest of the commodity group. I don’t fully understand the movements in the gold price, but I do think that there is a great deal of uncertainty and anxiety in financial markets right now and some people believe that holding gold will be a hedge against the fact that they view many other investments as being risky and hard to predict at this point.
I think Bernanke has this exactly right.
Toxic assets and toxic oil
In some ways the Gulf of Mexico oil spill seems like a replay of the subprime lending disaster. Clever technological innovations blew up in a mess that nobody knew how to control, wreaking devastation on those innocently standing by. The actors and the scenes have changed, but you can’t shake the feeling you’ve been through this nightmare before.
It’s not just Europe
I see many financial commentators bravely trying to explain recent ups and downs in asset and commodity prices in terms of news coming out of Europe. But a Eurocentric perspective misses an important part of the story.
Europe and the world economy
Since mid-April, the euro has depreciated 10% against the U.S. dollar and European stocks have lost 17% of their value. But markets aren’t acting as though the problems will be confined to Europe.
The European bailout
As Europe and the IMF announce close to a trillion dollar rescue package, Megan McArdle asks, what’s the benefit to the countries providing the funding? Here are my thoughts.
The Rescue Package Graphically Depicted
Staying sane in a crazy market
For a few exciting minutes on Thursday, the Dow-Jones Industrial Average was down a thousand points, with some major stocks momentarily falling to a penny a share. The basic story appears to be as follows. Initial strong selling in some stocks such as Procter & Gamble led the New York Stock Exchange to halt trading temporarily in a few stocks until specialists could sort out what was going on. But trading in those stocks continued on other exchanges, where as a result of their thinner books, orders to sell at any price went far down the list of existing buy bids. These lower prices triggered further automatic selling that sent some stocks all the way through the list of outstanding bids until encountering basement bids at one cent a share.
One popular meme is to attribute these fireworks to the existence of multiple trading venues that didn’t all get shut down simultaneously (e.g.,
WSJ or NYT). But I think we should also be taking a closer look at the folks who were sending the sell orders rather than just blaming the exchanges for carrying out the instructions they received.
Euro Area to US Contagion?
I was wondering why the Reuters website wasn’t loading on my computer. Then I got a phone call from a reporter asking about the US stock market meltdown in response to Greece…which struck me as an odd linkage. It still strikes me as an odd linkage.
Why Adam ate the apple
In my last post, I discussed how the run-up of U.S. mortgage debt during the last decade was funded. One important element was the sale of commercial paper that helped fund the purchase of some mortgage-related securities. Here I comment on why it was hard for some institutions to resist buying that commercial paper.