Volcker rule — coming, slowly, to a bank near you
Look on the bright side, we now know which rules the rulemakers will follow to get us to the Volcker rule. Some of them, at least.The Financial Stability Oversight Council on...
Basel takes aim at the negative basis
Basel is busy bolting stable doors.Indeed, one of the big drivers behind new Basel III counterparty risk capital requirements is the infamous negative basis trade.UBS banking...
Systemic Risk Arising from a Financial System that Requires Growth in a World with Limited Oil Supply
I received an e-mail from an actuarial group ( Joint Risk Management Section of the Society of Actuaries (SOA), the Casualty Actuarial Society (CAS), and the Canadian Institute of Actuaries (CIA) in collaboration with the SOA Investment Section, the In...
Geoeconomics, in pictures
This post is by Brad Setser and Paul Swartz of the Council on Foreign Relations. No doubt today’s GDP release...
The (almost) dollar crisis of 2007 …
It is now rather common to argue that those economists who anticipated the crisis anticipated the wrong crisis – a...
The faster the rise, the bigger the fall?
Cross-border bank claims - according to the Bank for International Settlement (BIS) — shrank in the first quarter, though at a slower pace than in the fourth quarter. That basic storyline also holds for the emerging world: the total amount the major international banks lent to the world’s emerging economies fell in...
Not necessarily always stabilizing …
One common argument — at least prior to the crisis — was that sovereign investors, because of their long-term focus, were generally a stabilizing presence in the market. Sovereign wealth funds in particular. And presumably central bank reserve managers as well. After all, in many cases, the line...
And now, the rest of the story: long-term portfolio flows have fallen by more than the trade deficit
The goods news: the US trade deficit has shrunk. On a rolling 12m basis the trade deficit is down to around $500 billion, and the data from the last few months suggests that it should fall even further.
The bad news: the US trade deficit hasn’t shrunk by as much as foreign demand...
