Consumer credit grows: Recovery is ON | read this item
First signs that the recovery may gain further traction albeit through the same process of cosumer leverage, which has plagued the country between 2003-2008.
Consumer credit outstanding during January posted its first gain in twelve months. Is a bottom to the year-long retrenchment in the making or will debt-laden balance sheets force further cutbacks? The $5.0B [...]
Greece and Argentina: Similarity Uncommon! | read this item
Marktwatch produced quite an interesting comparison between Greece in 2010 and Argentina in 1999.
Hard currency regime where officials had no control of monetary policy. Leading up to the crisis Argentina was operating under a “hard currency” monetary regime (a currency board that guaranteed convertibility from pesos to dollars on a 1:1 ratio) that had [...]
A good analysis of Government Interest payment: Another manipulation | read this item
According to this report, last year the Federal government paid $187 billion in net interest on $7.544 trillion of Treasury debt implying a positive interest rate of about 2.5%. How can it be that the government reports positive interest payments while its creditors claim to have lost money? It turns out that net [...]
India gross debt has come down from 63% in 2004 to 57% in 2009 and achieves the rare distinction of being among the very few economies in the world t o have deleveraged at the government level in the worst crisis the world has seen in half a century.
Soverign Risk: Portugal jumps the highest | read this item
CDS which is proxy for soverign default risk, is shown below. As shown, Portugal has seen the biggest spike in default risk this year with a gain of 145.5%. France ranks second at 87.7%, followed by Iceland, Germany, and Australia. Surprisingly, CDS for US debt has spiked 49.4%, which is more than both [...]
This is getting scary by the day. US debt ceiling raised to 14 trillion. This is the second time in six months that US had to go to the senate to raise debt limits.
New York Times:
The Senate voted on Thursday to raise the nation’s debt limit to $14.3 trillion, a $1.9 trillion increase that [...]
The correction is very close to being complete. Gold at 1100 represents 61.4% retracement of its high of $1225. There could be some more correction but should be contained to $1,070. But once the correction is complete, the upside looks massive. We should potentially see $1,500 next year without much effort.
Global Debt Comparison: interactive graphic | read this item
From the Economist. Possibly not the antidote it might be for equities soaring on the back of massive public sector mortgages but interesting. Click the image to go there and see it in action:
A piece of the press release blurb:
“The Global Public Debt Clock was developed using data and forecasts from the Economist Intelligence Unit [...]
On the heels of India’s Gold purchase, this one is for the records. Germany of all the countries (I mean the guys who are actually printing and defending their currencies) are now in the race to buy GOLD.
IMF is supposed to put the rest of 200 tonnes of GOLD on the blocks. India, China [...]
This one was always coming. Wasnt it. Given Dubai was leveraged over 200 times its GDP.
The cost of insuring Dubai’s sovereign debt against default continued to soar Thursday, after conglomerate Dubai World sought to delay debt payments. The company, which is the largest corporate entity in Dubai, has around $60 billion worth of liabilities and [...]
India: Debt comes down | 
Global Debt Comparison: interactive graphic | 
