Tag Archives: euro

A Review of Predictions of the Last Decade

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         December 31 is technically the end of the first decade of the 21st century.  It is perhaps an appropriate time to review one’s predictions.    It seems to me that I got some things right over the last decade.  Indulge me while I review the predictions that came true, before turning to those that did not work out as well.

Stock market peak     At the end of the 1990s, I felt that the dizzying ascent of equity prices could not continue into the new decade, that there was “…a bubble component in the stock market”  (Nov. 20, 1999).   This was four months before the bubble burst in 2000.  So far so good. read more

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Let Greece Go to the IMF

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The members of the eurozone and the EU have apparently decided that they must heroically rescue Greece, that this is better than having the IMF do it.   Senior figures in Brussels feel that the latter alternative is unthinkable.   I am a little confused about why.   Martin Wolf writes in the Financial Times this week that to bring in the Fund  “would demonstrate that this is not a true union at all.”    But the EU and EMU and not true fiscal unions.  If the citizens of Germany and other more successful countries were willing to bail out the Greeks, then fine;  the EMU would be ready to be a fiscal union.  But they are not; so it is not.   Given that reality, what is wrong with something that “demonstrates” it? read more

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America to China – “Stop Buying Our Dollars! And Another Thing: Please Buy Our Dollars.”

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     It is ironic that the dollar has strengthened rather than weakened over the last year.

· The sub-prime mortgage crisis originated in the United States;

· The crisis has severely undermined the credibility of American financial institutions – both in the narrower sense that leading investment banks have now disappeared and in the broader sense that American modes of corporate governance have lost value as role models (rating agencies, accounting systems, executive compensation, and so on) read more

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