12 | July | 2012 | New Economic Perspectives

Daily Archives: July 12, 2012

The Growing Pain in Spain

Posted on July 12, 2012 by Mitch Green | 10 comments

Just when you think that things can get no worse in Spain, they do. Take a look at this chart, courtesy of Credit Suisse via FT’s Alphaville

http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2012/07/11/1080121/just-another-scary-spanish-capital-flight-chart/#comments

Yiagos Alexopoulos at Credit Suisse estimates that Spanish capital outflows are currently running at an annualised rate of 50 per cent of GDP. No question, the bank run is clearly accelerating, and one can easily understand why. The country is turning into a Little House of Economic Horrors. The alleged “rescue” of Madrid’s banks is a non-starter. 100 billion euros won’t begin to cover the scale of the problem on any honest accounting or “stress test” (and that’s before we get to the next phase of announced austerity measures). Continue reading →

10 Comments

Posted in Marshall Auerback

Tagged austerity, euro, Eurozone, spain, unemployment

What’s The Plan?

Posted on July 12, 2012 by Dan Kervick | 29 comments

By Dan Kervick

The politicians always seem to be the last people to get it. But anyone who actually works in the corporate world knows that the central economic concern these days, the thing that is holding us all back economically, is not uncertainty about tax rates. They also know the core problem is not frustration with regulation and red tape. Nor is the problem an epidemic of nocturnal terrors about government deficits. The problem is this: not enough customers. And the problem of not enough customers right now is exacerbated by the fact that there is also low confidence that there will be more customers in the foreseeable future. With low confidence that broad prosperity will return to customers, the willingness to invest and hire aggressively is limited. And since so many businesses perceive the world the same way, the combined effect of their general unwillingness to hire is persistent high unemployment, and a self-reinforcing perpetuation of the low demand that is the cause of the unwillingness to hire in the first place.

Continue reading →