With Greece on the verge of default, we’re about to learn how little has really changed since governments around the world wrote the last round of bail out checks to prop up failing financial institutions. Just as the collapse of the US subprime mortgage market rippled into nearly every corner of the global financial system, [...]
With the sudden collapse of the Qaddafi regime in Tripoli, the oil industry is hoping it can repair enough of Libya’s damaged export terminals, pumping stations and pipelines to get as much as one million barrels a day of oil flowing into the market within the next six to 12 months. But as I have [...]
Ever since the North American Free Trade Agreement was implemented in 1994, Canada’s economic compass has been pointing south. But with U.S. oil prices more than $20 below world levels, an American auto market nearly 50% cent smaller, and a broke and dysfunctional Washington that is dependent on the People’s Bank of China for funding, [...]
It is not that difficult to discover who is the most concerned about Standard & Poor’s recent downgrade of the United States’ coveted AAA credit rating. The People’s Bank of China owns more Treasury bonds than anyone. All of a sudden, the liquidity of the U.S. Treasuries market no longer looks so appealing for the [...]
Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan was recently quoted as seeing the country as a nuclear-free nation. But unlike similar pronouncements from Germany, which pledges to be nuclear-free by 2022, Japan may become nuclear free literally within a year. That would be quite a feat for a country that only five months ago relied on nuclear [...]
Even though the world economy is drowning in government debt, borrowing rates remained chained to record low rate setting by the G7 central banks. In the U.S., the Federal Reserve has effectively anchored its key setting federal funds rate around zero. The Bank of Canada, for all its warnings about consumer debt levels, has its [...]