Free Republic

The twin crashes in US commercial real estate and the US bond market have collided with $9 trillion uninsured deposits in the American banking system. Such deposits can vanish in an afternoon in the cyber age. The second and third biggest bank failures in US history have followed in quick succession. The US Treasury and Federal Reserve would like us to believe that they are “idiosyncratic”. That is a dangerous evasion. Almost half of America’s 4,800 banks have already burned through their capital buffers and are running on negative equity. They may not have to mark all losses to market...

The EU is fortifying itself with remarkable speed for a new era of 'zero gas' from Russia A Western oil embargo against Russia raises the geostrategic stakes exponentially. What was almost unthinkable last week looks almost unstoppable this week. Ukrainian resistance and outraged moral opinion in the democracies has changed the character of this war, and changed what the West is prepared to do. The White House is sending emergency missions to Saudi Arabia and Venezuela to find extra barrels. The US is pushing for a quick deal with Tehran on nuclear proliferation to bring back Iranian crude. All normal...

Twenty-three years ago I crossed swords with a younger Brett Kavanaugh in one of the weirdest and most disturbing episodes of my career as a journalist. What happened leaves me in no doubt that he lacks judicial character and is unfit to serve on the US Supreme Court for the next thirty years or more, whatever his political ideology.

“Critics tell me that I have invested too much emotion in my quarrel with the Clintons. To that I plead guilty. It comes from befriending so many of their victims. I am content to be blacklisted as the "mad scribbler" - as the Washington Post called me this week - for I am confident that one day historians are going to view Clinton as a the last great cad of the 20th century, or worse.” “To the American people I bid a fond farewell. Guard your liberties. It is the trust of each generation to pass a free republic to...

The European Union is eroding from its periphery and it is collapsing in pieces even in Germany and France. It is highly fragile and if real recessionary winds blow the EU will start to crumble at a faster pace. We say the faster, the better. The bureaucrats are clinging to the dream, but the dream has morphed into something very different for many in Europe. We can’t say that we’re disappointed. From The Telegraph) “The Stability and Growth Pact has more or less failed. Market discipline is done away with by ECB interventions. So there is no fiscal control mechanism...

The global financial system has become dangerously unstable and faces an avalanche of bankruptcies that will test social and political stability, a leading monetary theorist has warned. "The situation is worse than it was in 2007. Our macroeconomic ammunition to fight downturns is essentially all used up," said William White, the Swiss-based chairman of the OECD's review committee and former chief economist of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). "Debts have continued to build up over the last eight years and they have reached such levels in every part of the world that they have become a potent cause for...

Global debt levels are dangerously high and central banks cannot keep the game going indefinitely, warns the high priest of orthodoxy Debt ratios have reached extreme levels across all major regions of the global economy, leaving the financial system acutely vulnerable to monetary tightening by the US Federal Reserve, the world's top financial watchdog has warned. The Bank for International Settlements said the wild market ructions of recent weeks and capital outflows from China are warning signs that the massive build-up in credit is coming back to haunt, compounded by worries that policymakers may be struggling to control events. "We...

One piece of the jigsaw puzzle is missing to complete the deflation landscape across the West: a slide in oil prices. This is becoming more likely each month. Turmoil across the Middle East and parts of Africa has choked supply over the past two years, keeping Brent crude near $110 a barrel despite a broader commodity slump. Cotton and corn prices have halved, as has the UBS index of industrial metals. Such anomalies rarely last. "We estimate that crude oil is now the mostly richly priced commodity in the world," says Deutsche Bank in a fresh report. Michael Lewis, the...

We have a minor earthquake in France. A party committed to withdrawal from the euro, the restoration of French franc, and the complete destruction of monetary union has just defeated the establishment in the Brignoles run-off election. It is threatening Frexit as well, which rather alters the political chemistry of Britain's EU referendum. Marine Le Pen's Front National won 54pc of the vote. It was a bad defeat for the Gaulliste UMP, a party at risk of disintegration unless it can find a leader in short order. President Hollande's Socialists were knocked out in the first round, due to mass...

Doubts are growing about whether China can pass the US to become the world's biggest economy this century amid warnings that the country’s 30-year miracle is nearing exhaustion.

<p>The punishment regime imposed on Cyprus is a trick against everybody involved in this squalid saga, against the Cypriot people and the German people, against savers and creditors. All are being deceived.</p>

George Soros has put the matter nicely at the National Association for Business Economics in New York. If the world could somehow persuade Germany to pull out of EMU, Europe’s never-ending crisis "would disappear in thin air". The residual euro would fall to a level that better reflected economic fundamentals in Southern Europe. Competitiveness would largely be restored at a stroke, without the need for debt-deflation. There would be no further risk of large sovereign defaults. Mr Soros said — as he has many times before — that the current course is pushing euroland into a "lasting depression, and...

The International Monetary Fund has demolished the intellectual foundations of Europe's debt crisis strategy. Drastic fiscal tightening in a string of interlinked countries does two to three times more damage than assumed, especially if there is no offsetting monetary stimulus. Pushed beyond the therapeutic dose, it is self-defeating. At a certain point it becomes pain for pain's sake. The error has long been obvious in Greece. The EU-IMF Troika originally said the economy would rebound quickly, growing 1.1pc in 2011, and 2.1pc in 2012, and on from there to sunlit uplands. In fact, Greek GDP contracted by 4.5pc in 2010,...

Five years into the Long Slump it almost seems as if we are back to square one. China is sufficiently alarmed by the flint hardness of its "soft-landing" to talk up trillions of fresh stimulus. The European Central Bank is preparing to print “whatever it takes”to save Spain and Italy. Markets are pricing in an 80pc chance of yet more printing by the US Federal Reserve in September or soon after. There is no doubt that the three superpowers acting in concert can launch a mini-cycle of growth early next year - assuming they deliver on their rhetoric - but...

The euro has essentially broken down as a viable economic and political undertaking. The latest rush of events reeks of impending denouement. Switzerland is threatening capital controls to repel bank flight from Euroland. The Swiss two-year note has fallen to -0.32pc, not that it seems to make any difference. Denmark’s central bank said it was battening down the hatches for a "splintering" of EMU. It has cut interest rates twice in a matter or days and pledged to do whatever it takes to stop euros flooding into the country. Contingency plans are on the lips of officials in every capital...

France's economy has weathered the global crisis of the last five years deceptively well, shielded by a Leviathan state and the postponement of hard choices. Yet the underlying decline that began 30 years ago has gathered speed. France's share of eurozone exports has dropped from 17pc to 13pc since 2000. Spain, Benelux and Germany have done much better. "France is coddled with illusions," said Jean Peyrelevade, ex-head of Credit Lyonnais. "Economic decline is the brutal, hard, undeniable reality. We are consuming the leftovers of a past prosperity." The trade account - an iconic indicator for Colbertistes - has switched from...

China’s Communist Party is gambling that this year’s tap on the brakes has been just enough to curb the housing boom and stop inflation pushing up to danger levels, but not enough to tip the economy into a hard-landing. The great hope is that Goldilocks growth can be kept on track to ensure an orderly transition of power in October 2012, when a new generation of leaders takes charge of the 1.3bn strong nation for the first time in a decade. The front-runner for General Secretary appears to be Xi Jinping, China’s "Redder than Red" mystery man. With public debt...

The global credit markets are braced for deflation and perhaps depression. Panic flight to safety has pushed the yield on 10-year US Treasuries below 2pc for the first time in American history, exceeding the extremes of the Lehman crisis and the banking crash of the 1930s. Investors scrambled to buy the bonds of strongest industrial states on Thursday on fears of a double-dip recession on both sides of the Atlantic and a European banking crash, driving down their returns to investors. German yields fell to 2.08pc and Switzerland's 3-month rates have turned deeply negative. Markets were stunned by a plunge...

Entitled "Deflation: Making Sure It Doesn’t Happen Here", it is a warfare manual for defeating economic slumps by use of extreme monetary stimulus once interest rates have dropped to zero, and implicitly once governments have spent themselves to near bankruptcy. "snip>" Societe Generale's uber-bear Albert Edwards said the Fed and other central banks will be forced to print more money whatever they now say, given the "stinking fiscal mess" across the developed world. "The response to the coming deflationary maelstrom will be additional money printing that will make the recent QE seem insignificant," he said. Despite the apparent rift with...

Europe's Fiscal Fascism Brings British Withdrawal Ever Closer By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard Economics Last updated: May 14th, 2010 Just when you thought the EU could not go any further down the road towards authoritarian excess, it gets worse. The EU's monetary union is in tatters (Photo: Alamy) The European Commission is calling for EU powers to vet budgets of the 27 member states before the draft laws have been presented to the House of Commons, the Tweede Kamer, the Folketing, the Bundestag, the Assemblee Nationale, or other national parliaments. It applies to Britain even though we are not in EMU. Fonctionnaires...