By Ian Fraser Published: Sunday Herald Date: November 11th, 2012 Stability of leadership has been confirmed in the US and China – now they need stability in their economies, or the world will suffer. By Ian Fraser Today’s global economy is like a drunk meandering his way across a busy street after a year-long binge [...]
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 [...]
August 12th, 2012 Has Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, over-reached himself? Are sycophantic lieutenants and desperate national leaders telling him everything he wants to hear? Last week he indicated that the Frankfurt-based institution was poised to embark on new round of sovereign bond buying. In particular Draghi is eyeing the sovereign bonds of [...]
November 24th, 2011 Kyle Bass talks a great deal of sense in this HardTalk interview with the BBC’s Sarah Montague (whose apparent inability to understand much of what Bass is saying only partially mars the session). The 24 minute 30 second interview was first aired on the BBC on Saturday November 19th, 2011. Bass, founder of Dallas-based [...]
November 19th, 2011 Ian Fraser’s introduction: This blog was written by Golem XIV, a pseudonym for filmmaker and author David Malone. David’s core argument is that banks, not governments, are to blame for the current eurozone sovereign debt crisis. While there are some serious omissions — the article does not mention the flawed nature of [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: Sunday Herald Date: November 6th, 2011 Nicolas Sarkozy had hoped to use his time as head of the G20 to achieve lofty goals like rethinking the global financial system and tackling commodity price volatility. But the French president has ended up doing little other than fire-fighting and his tenure may yet [...]
August 4th, 2011 It must have seemed a good idea at the time. The Smurfs were welcomed by the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street last Friday, July 29th, to ring the opening bell. This may have been a good move for Sony Pictures, which has a movie to plug but it has turned [...]
August 1st, 2011 If you’ve been wondering what the hell’s been going on in America in the past few days, you could do worse than watch this satirical take from Taiwan-based Next Media Animation. The tea partiers are portrayed as gun-toting babies, and a “highlight” come when one of these mewling and puking infants reaches [...]
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 17th, 2011 Jim Rogers, the plain-speaking, Singapore-based investor, always talks sense about the debt blindness that continues to afflict the West. In this interview on CNN Money, Rogers tells Poppy Harlow: “Greece is bankrupt and the sooner we recognise that and do something about it the better … Eventually we’re going to have to bite [...]