Tag Archives: bubbles

Housing finance is interesting, and offers an interesting take on some theoretical issues. Although the theoretical issues sound abstract, they are critical issues in economies facing a housing bubble. This article looks at one aspect of housing finance: the limit to financing is credit risk, not funding. Monetary flows in a credit-based economy are circular. Bond Economics Housing Bubbles And Their Financing Brian Romanchuk

So it seems that a good chunk of the GOP/Trump tax cuts will go to buybacks, and to fuel the bubble in the stock market, according to Robin Wigglesworth in the FT (subscription required). Bad news for those that think that higher earnings lead to higher investment (meaning gross formation of capital). My impression is that if you want tax cuts to be stimulative, you should target consumption, in particular for lower income groups, which tend to spend a higher proportion of their income.

Summary of Grantham's guesses (described "absolutely my personal views")A melt-up or end-phase of a bubble within the next 6 months to 2 years is likely, i.e., over 50%. If there is a melt-up, then the odds of a subsequent bubble break or melt-down are very, very high, i.e., over 90%. If there is a market decline following a melt-up, it is quite likely to be a decline of some 50%. If such a decline takes place, I believe the market is very likely (over 2:1) to bounce back up way over the...

Is Bitcoin a bubble? It's a natural question to ask—especially after Bitcoin's price shot up from $12,000 to $15,000 this week. So we decided to ask a couple of experts on bubbles what they thought: Brent Goldfarb is a business professor at the University of Maryland, and William Deringer is a historian at MIT. Both have done research on the history and economics of bubbles, and they talked to Ars by phone this week as Bitcoin continues its surge. Both academics saw clear parallels...

Here is a very familiar financial bubble, in pictorial form: And this is what it looks like, charted: In those days, of course, tulips at least had to be able to flower. But things have changed since then.There are three key stages in the lifecycle of a financial bubble:The "Free Lunch" period. A long, slow buildup of price distortion, during which investors convince themselves that rising prices are entirely justified by fundamentals, even though it is apparent to (rational) observers...

Over at VoxEU, Philippe Bachetta and Ouarda Merrouche have a surprising take on "countercyclical" lending. They show that lending by US and European banks in US dollars to European non-financial corporates massively increased from 2007-2009, and that this helped to soften the effect of the European credit crunch on employment: Over the period 2004 to 2009, we find that foreign credit denominated in dollar to non-financial corporates is countercyclical – it increased sharply (relative to...