Housing markets are prone to the bandwagon effect, they continue rising when the fundamentals vanish, a year, maybe two years before. Stock market and commodity price volatility and declines are currently chronicled ad-nausea by the press without seeing the dramatic upswing of international property price falls. What is alarming is the pace of price declines. Even countries where prices are not falling, …
Charles Hugh Smith – Is the Stock Market Now “Too Big to Fail”?
Correspondent Bart D. recently speculated that the U.S. stock market was now “too big to fail,” that is, that it was too integral to the global financial system and economy to be allowed to fail, i.e. decline 40+% as in previous bubble bursts. The U.S. stock market is integral to the global financial system in two ways.Now that investment banks, …
Dean Baker – The China Syndrome: Bubble Trouble
The financial markets have been through some wild and crazy times over the last two weeks, although it appears that they have finally stabilized. The net effect of all the gyrations is that a serious bubble in China’s market seems to have been at least partially deflated. After hugely over-reacting to this correction, most other markets have largely recovered. Prices …
John Ficene – China currency devaluation signals endgame leaving equity markets free to collapse under the weight of impossible expectations
When the banking crisis crippled global markets seven years ago, central bankers stepped in as lenders of last resort. Profligate private-sector loans were moved on to the public-sector balance sheet and vast money-printing gave the global economy room to heal. Time is now rapidly running out. From China to Brazil, the central banks have lost control and at the same …
OECD report documents growth of financial parasitism By Nick Beams
A report issued by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) last Wednesday is confirmation that the financial crisis of 2008 was not a temporary downturn in the world economy, but arose from fundamental contradictions at the very heart of the global capitalist system. Seven years on, those contradictions are deepening. They have been exacerbated by the policy pursued …
Central Bank of Central Banks Warns That World is Unprepared to Fight Global Crash By Mac Slavo
According to the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the shadowy “central bank of central banks,” the world as it stands is incapable of combating another global financial crash – a crash that there is every reason to think is coming. That’s because the economy remains in the hands of the Federal Reserve and other central banks. The financial wizards in THIS …
Renewable energy redoubles its global reach By Alex Kirby
As the world economy and energy use both grew in 2014, renewables continued their rapid rise− but carbon emissions did not. LONDON, 27 June, 2015 − A significant threshold has been crossed by renewable energy as analysts report that the sectorʼs size last year reached double the level it was at just 10 years earlier. This expansion happened in a year when the global economy and energy …
Oil Markets Could Be In For A Shock From China Soon By Nick Cunningham
Oil analysts and commodity traders watch the price of crude swing down and up, and are trying to figure out when and to what extent the OPEC “price war” will force supply reductions from US shale. Any insight into this development can clarify the trajectory of oil prices. But, of course, oil market dynamics are complex and fluid. US shale …
HSBC fears world recession with no lifeboats left
The world economy is disturbingly close to stall speed. The United Nationshas cut its global growth forecast for this year to 2.8pc, the latest of the multinational bodies to retreat. We are not yet in the danger zone but this pace is only slightly above the 2.5pc rate that used to be regarded as a recession for the international system as …
The Debt To GDP Ratio For The Entire World: 286 Percent – Michael Sndyer
Did you know that there is more than $28,000 of debt for every man, woman and child on the entire planet? And since close to 3 billion of those people survive on less than 2 dollars a day, your share of that debt is going to be much larger than that. If we took everything that the global economy produced this year …