By Ian Fraser Published: Qfinance Date: December 3rd, 2012 Just in case the two men who were recently installed as China’s leader-in-waiting – premier-designate Li Keqiang and Communist Party of China chief and president-designate Xi Jinping – are short of advice about how best to steer the Chinese economy over the next few years, they have just [...]
October 19th, 2012 This edited transcript is expanded from a live phone interview with Michael Hudson by Dimitris Yannopoulos for Athens News. It summarizes some of the major themes from Hudson’s new book, The Bubble and Beyond: Fictitious Capital, Debt Deflation and Global Crisis, published in the UK in July 2012 and available from Amazon.co.uk. The [...]
September 24th, 2012 I’m half way through Simon Carswell’s Anglo Republic: Inside the bank that broke Ireland, and it’s a gripping read. In the book Carswell, finance correspondent of the Irish Times, describes how, from small beginnings, Anglo Irish Bank became a highly leveraged bet on the future of Ireland’s increasingly unsustainable property market, became a [...]
June 14th, 2012 Ian Fraser’s introduction: This blog was written by Golem XIV, a pseudonym for filmmaker and author David Malone. Let me make it clear straight away: the lies, corruption, cowardice and greed of Spanish bankers and government officials is nothing special. What is happening in Spain now, reminds me of the likes of RBS and [...]
June 13th, 2012 The IMF has produced a blog on the situation facing banks in Central and Eastern Europe. The majority of banks in the region are owned by Western European banks, and have therefore suffered as a result of the weaknesses of their parent institutions, which has caused the latter to withdraw billions of [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: QFINANCE Date: March 5th, 2012 China is so vast, its leaders so inscrutable, it’s future so tied to imponderables — including who will succeed premier Wen Jiabao, whether the country can realistically remain a one-party-state and the true depth of state-sponsored graft — that its mid-term economic prospects are hard to gauge. The country [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: QFINANCE Date: November 17th, 2011 In its first ever formal assessment of the stability of China’s financial system, the International Monetary Fund has blamed heavy-handed state intervention for creating “vulnerabilities” in the system, at the same time as providing Beijing with a detailed blueprint for reform. What the IMF recommended and China’s reaction [...]
October 3rd, 2011 So it was endemic fraud and the collapse of the rule of law—not global imbalances or government and regulatory failure—that destroyed the financial system. In a keynote speech given at the Post Keynes conference in Denmark earlier this year, the Keynesian economist James K. Galbraith of the L.B.J. School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: QFINANCE Date: July 26th, 2011 The package of measures thrashed out by French president Nicolas Sarkozy, German chancellor Angela Merkel and other European policymakers at their emergency summit on July 21 was immediately hailed for its boldness. After months of prevarication the continent’s leaders seemed to have pulled out all the [...]
June 1st, 2011 In wake of the resignation of “le seducteur extraordinaire” Dominique Strass-Kahn, we are in desperate need for some fresh thinking on Europe’s sovereign debt crisis. Yet the EU is determined to impose the French finance minister and former corporate lawyer Christine Lagarde as the IMF’s next boss (and she has been touring BRICs [...]