Low US inflation is essential.

Financial News, a Dow Jones Company, 19th April 2010 Profits are very important, not only for shareholders but also for the economy. When profits collapse, the economy dives. Investment and employment both drop sharply and the economy is often so badly hit that...

Bank Reform is Essential for Capitalism.

Financial News, a Dow Jones Company, 8th March 2010 Economists so seldom agree that any assembled group is likely to have more opinions than members (N economists = N + 1 opinions). It is therefore unusual to find so much agreement as there is today about the need for...

A Slow Recovery for a Happy New Year.

Nikkei Veritas – Market Eye column, 18th February 2010 Economic forecasts are notoriously unreliable; what is perhaps less understood is the way in which they tend to err. The OECD is a highly professional body and their forecasting errors are typical of the...

Debt and the data.

Financial World, 1st January 2010 “Andrew Smithers has strong grounds for believing that high levels of US business debt pose as big a threat as personal indebtedness.” The level of personal debt in the US is widely recognised as a major problem for the...

The Economic and Stock Market Outlook.

Financial News, a Dow Jones Company, 14th December 2009 Central bankers, in particular the Federal Reserve, are those primarily responsible for the current mess in which we find ourselves. Their key error was to claim that asset prices didn’t matter and, to make...