The three Baltic economies of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia have been the biggest losers of the 2008-2009 global financial crisis, contracting by 14.1%, 14.8% and a whopping 18.0% in 2009 respectively. After overheating in the preceding three years (Latvia grew on average 10.9% between 2005 and 2007), tightening global credit conditions towards the tail-end of… [Read more]
Let’s rewind two years, to a time before ‘credit crunch’, ‘quantitative easing’, ‘TARP’ or ‘staycation’ had entered the popular vocabulary. I’m talking about a time in which the term ‘currency manipulator’ was part of the zeitgeist of US-China economic relations. Today, G20 summits come and go without this phrase, which once seemed almost ubiquitous, being… [Read more]
The Brazilian government and the Banco Central do Brasil (BCB) have presented a comprehensive list of measures to tackle the effects of the credit crunch and clogged up money markets. The extent and size of these measures suggest that policymakers in Brazil have recognised the severity of the crisis and are determined to address these… [Read more]
One of the reasons I favoured the Gulf stock markets at the beginning of this year, when the rest of the world was crashing and burning, was that they had the one thing the rest of the world was lacking: liquidity. Accordingly, as G20 and mainstream EM financial institutions were gasping for air, most of… [Read more]
Recent moves in the natural gas market do not bode well for higher oil prices in the near term, as the chart below suggests (click on the chart for a closer look). The dashed line is the front-month Henry Hub natural gas future (right-hand axis), and the solid line is front-month Brent Crude oil (left-hand… [Read more]
Using the word ‘unprecedented’ too often risks diluting its significance. But with the US government’s rescue of government sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, we are once again in unprecedented territory, following on from the Federal Reserve’s aggressive intra-meeting rate cuts, the opening of new Fed lending facilities, and the last-ditch rescue of… [Read more]