The Gold Standard 

Cut and grow is the economic policy du jour in Europe. But it is hardly popular Outgoing Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti warned: “There is a significant time-lag between the structural reforms and the results in terms of increased economic activity and job creation....In this context, public support for the reforms, and worse, for the European Union, is dramatically declining.”

The Economist noted last month that the IMF forecast that “France will join Spain, Italy, Greece and Portugal in recession in 2013.”

Portugal Read more

“The fundamental problem is still that there are many more countries keener on exporting than on consuming, and not much export demand to go around. The US has no desire to return to being the consumer of last resort. In the eurozone, though the external position as a whole has been largely balanced, the troubled economies of Ireland, Spain, Greece and Portugal desperately need to increase exports. Yet core countries – particularly Germany, which has benefited from Chinese purchase of machine tools in recent years, are Read more

Blame Angela is one of the few things most Europeans can agree on “Scapegoating is inevitable during financial upheavals, says marcel Fratzscher, president of DIW Berlin, a think-tank,” reported the Economist. “Germany, he suggests, has taken the place of the IMF during the Asian crisis of the late 1990s.” Rich Germany, of course, is blamed for solving its economic problems when other European countries were exacerbating theirs.

But Germany may not be so rich. According to a wealth study by the European Central Bank, German Read more

Cue the critics. QE is getting a rethink. As reported by the Financial Times’ Dan McCrum, “One of Wall Street’s biggest money managers has called the Federal Reserve to rein in its programme of quantitative easing, calling the bond-buying tactics a ‘large and dull hammer’ that has distorted markets and risks stoking inflation.”

Rick Rieder, who oversees $763bn in fixed income investments for BlackRock spoke out as the Fed debates how long to keep up the unorthodox measures it has used to stimulate the US economy. His Read more