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, [...]
2010 left us all with a mountain of debt. Whether you’re a taxpayer in the UK, Ireland or the US, it must already be pretty clear that you’re on the hook for a lot of IOUs borrowed from your future. You may not have borrowed the money yourself, but your government has already done it [...]
German and British taxpayers are beginning to realize the downside of our economic interdependence in the global economy. When British banks have too much exposure to Irish banks, all of a sudden Dublin’s property crash becomes the UK’s problem. Similarly, when German taxpayers have to bail out bankrupt governments in Athens and Dublin, Greece and [...]
If it’s true that the economies of the EU and US are headed for a double dip, what will put them into a second recession is exactly what got them out of the last one. Only a year ago, G8 leaders were congratulating themselves as their coordinated stimulus packages jointly lifted their economies out of [...]
It took two tries, but I finally got past the ash cloud and made it to Lisbon to promote the Portuguese edition of my book. What I found when I got there was a country already preparing itself for the new smaller world that my book predicts. The European monetary union is a vestige of [...]
A $10-per-barrel drop in oil prices seems a curious response to the ongoing disaster at BP’s Deepwater Horizon wellhead, and to its potentially devastating repercussions on future world oil supply. But when the Dow loses 1,000 points in the same week, there’s obviously something else going on. If the world’s economic outlook is the same [...]