Letter from DC
It has been a long time since I walked the streets of the United States capital. Like Cambridge, much remains unchanged, but there are some telling alterations. I thought it was a sign of the times that on K street, … Continued
A really pessimistic scenario
I’ve been accused of being rather pessimistic about the Euro mess and the risk of Europe’s historic tensions rising to the surface again. But here is a really bleak imagining of the next few years from Harvard’s Dani Rodrik. It’s unlikely … Continued
Coming soon: one petayen
While awaiting the outcome of the Greek elections this coming weekend, the focus has been shifting in the blogosphere and on Bloomberg to the world’s most indebted government by far, Japan. Japan’s debt to GDP ratio is about 220%, around double … Continued
Chinese real estate really is in trouble
In case there hasn’t been enough bad news for you recently ($2bn loss at supposedly the world’s best managed bank, Greece heading for financial collapse, the UK back in recession, stubbornly weak employment data in the US) the evidence is … Continued
Greece leaving Europe
As everybody has by now noticed, Greece and the ECB/EU are playing a game of chicken. If the opinion polls are correct, the anti-austerity vote will rise in the second set of Greek elections in June. A failure to keep … Continued
The Chinese (banks) are coming
Last week, amid all the fuss about the French and Greek elections, the Federal Reserve Board approved the acquisition by the world’s largest bank by value, ICBC (Industrial and Commercial Bank of China), of a majority stake in the Bank of East … Continued
The public sector “stream” within the MFin
When we launched the MFin in 2008 I think most of us had in mind as typical students people who were looking for jobs in the private sector. It was partly the fact that it is a “premium fee” (i.e. … Continued
Why Obama’s candidate for the World Bank might be the right person after all
Like a lot of people, I was disappointed that the latest vacancy for the President of the World Bank would likely be filled by another American nominated by the US President. It has been custom and practice for the head … Continued
The best investment banker I knew
One consequence of getting older is that friends and former colleagues appear more frequently in the news. Last week it was the planning minister, Greg Clark, who I met when we were PhD students at LSE, launching a revamp of Britain’s … Continued
Financial repression, west and east
The FT has an article by their Beijing correspondent, Simon Rabinovitch, saying that Chinese customers are getting angry about the big banks’ ever growing profits, which are in part at the expense of depositors who receive a negative real interest rate. … Continued
The march of Chinese banks
Having just given two talks, in Singapore and Hong Kong, on the likelihood of Chinese banks, already the world’s most profitable, changing the world, it’s good to see my old boss Jamie Dimon agreeing with me. Dimon was quoted in … Continued
The military roots of economic theory
The Institute for New Economic Thinking was founded two years ago with funding from George Soros. It held its first ever conference here in Cambridge, where possibly the greatest combination of leading economists ever assembled for one meeting debated how … Continued
The death of derivatives?
Amid the gloom on the Eurozone, sluggish growth in the US and worries over a real estate collapse in China, some students ask me if there’s any future for the financial system? Understandably their main concern is jobs. I can … Continued
A more pessimistic view of the Eurozone outlook
In the interests of balance, and because frankly I find it more convincing, I must mention another new report from the Peterson Institute for International Economics, by Simon Johnson and Peter Boone. Called “The Eurozone Crisis Deepens“, it rather depressingly … Continued
Chinese banks and the world
I recently gave a talk to Cambridge alumni on what I think the major Chinese banks might do in the future. I’m giving a version of the talk in Singapore and Hong Kong in February. There is a short video … Continued