Papandreou Tells Greeks It’s Time To Grow Up

November 3, 2011

Papandreou told his fellow Greeks to make a choice and accept the consequences. It’s a gamble, but not an irrational one.

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A Whipsaw Summer Gets Put On Ice

October 31, 2011

After a summer of extreme ups and downs, it’s time to stop frightening ourselves needlessly.

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Seeing A Scary Movie For The Second Time

October 4, 2011

The markets are a horror show again, but we’ve seen this film before. The ending is not so bad.

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Sweet Music To Soothe The Savage Banker

September 16, 2011

All together now: “There Will Never Be Another Lehman.”

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Europe Accepts A Little Reality

July 22, 2011

A small dose of reality helped move the Greek drama closer to its conclusion yesterday Tragedies do not have happy endings.

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Expecting The Impossible And Denying The Inevitable

July 1, 2011

At lunch the other day, a friend who recently returned to New York after living abroad for many years asked me what will happen if the federal debt ceiling is not raised before the official drop-dead date of Aug. 2. I said pretty much what President Obama said at Wednesday’s news conference, when he declared that the fallout from missing the deadline, and any resulting default on Treasury debt, would …

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The Euro Lifeboat

December 2, 2010

Citizens of Germany, Greece and Ireland are all learning an important lesson: When you share a lifeboat with someone, you can’t each go your own way. Germany is the biggest contributor to the $113 billion bailout that the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund cobbled together for Ireland last weekend. The seven-year package of loans, totaling 85 billion euros at an average interest rate of 5.8 percent, guarantees …

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The Economic Fujiwara

November 22, 2010

The dollar is up against the euro. No, the dollar is down against the euro. Now it’s up again. Until it goes down. Meteorologists have a term, the “Fujiwara effect,” to describe the interaction of two storms in close proximity. In the Northern hemisphere, wind blows counterclockwise around centers of low pressure. When two lows “dance the Fujiwara,” as some scientists put it, the winds of each storm influence the …

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Restoring Confidence In Europe’s Banks

June 25, 2010

The financial crisis that gripped the world in late 2008 was, most of all, a crisis of confidence. What we knew about the condition of America’s biggest financial institutions was bad enough, but what we didn’t know was terrifying. This is why the “stress tests” that financial regulators publicly performed on 19 of the country’s largest financial firms last year were so helpful. In some cases the news was good, …

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How Low Interest Rates Sap Economic Growth

June 14, 2010

Conventional wisdom tells us we need record-low interest rates to help the global economy recover from the Great Recession and bring about a more prosperous future. Let me respectfully point out that, in this country, we have had low interest rates — ranging from pretty low to astonishingly, jaw-droppingly low — for the past 15 years, and we have arrived at a future that is not what we were aiming …

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