Today, we have reserved a guest post for Jan De Blonde who is very actively engaged in sustainable farmland investment abroad. Jan is ...
My friend the equity racehorse sent me me the following interesting link which appeared on Dutch television and which basically ...
Vorige zondag (6 mei 2012) verscheen het volgend interview in De Zondag:
Elk jaar omtrent deze tijd publiceert BP zijn Statistical Review of World Energy. Bijna 50 pagina’s grotendeels gevuld met tabellen ...
Door een abrupt beëindigde skivakantie (nauwelijks 50 meter op de latten gestaan) bracht ik de rest van de week haast immobiel en al ...
Well, it's not exactly Moody's but more precisely Fitch, sending out messages which are "surprising" to say the least. Remember ...
Davos, setting of the Thomas Mann novel "Der Zauberberg" and sheltering famous people throughout history such as ...
Following our adventures in today's every changing moods in the world of finance, it's not a bad thing to assess volatility as a ...
You may remember I wrote a piece on Asia Pacific Breweries (APB) , Heineken and Fraser & Neave (F&N) when I was in Singapore earlier ...
My dear friend Sideshow Bob sent me a short note which I think deserves some attention. It opens up the discussion on one of the most ...
Geen kat die deze stelling zal betwisten, maar de impact ervan op de Chinese economie wordt vermoedelijk zwaar onderschat. We hebben ...
De kogel is door de kerk, iedereen van ons kan straks aandeelhouder van Facebook worden. Intekenen op een IPO is echter niet altijd ...
Apple kwam de afgelopen week met de langverwachte medeling over hun spaarpot van 100 miljard $. Een mogelijke overname is nog niet in ...
On March 14th, the Media Innovation Center was launched (under the wings of the IBBT) and baptized 'Mix'. Its goal is to support and ...
Yesterday Fitch released a report with some arithmetics and outlook on the ageing population and how the developed west so far has ...
According to the World Economic Forum, Canadian banks have been ranked as the soundest and most safe banks world-wide, this for 5 ...
Gemini, the immortal twins Castor and Pollux, in this case Dublin and Cork. We picked up an interesting story from out of Bloomberg ...
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Yesterday Fitch released a report with some arithmetics and outlook on the ageing population and how the developed west so far has anticipated on these demographic evolutions. As usual, most politicians and media take this with a benign neglect attitude : What's the problem, 2050 is still ages away ? Or in true Belgian style, it ...
Let's put in a USD 550 bio extra of asset purchases, or may be on second thought, let's double that amount. After 9 consecutive rounds of QE worth JPY 100 trillion - roughly EUR 1,000 bio and some small change - the freshly elected Japanese government headed by Shinzo Abe is looking for something more, let's say, "challenging". ...
Well not exactly hooray as far as the IMF is concerned : Apparently the IMF is not happy with Latvia having refunded their entire 2008 bail-out loan already. The IMF at one point even gave the advice of "piano, piano" or "we don't need so much money from you right now". The Latvians nevertheless pushed forward and now have of ...
"Life without music would be a mistake" - Friedrich Nietzsche. So before turning over to the 2012 review and 2013 outlook, let's just have a quick playful stop first by way of introduction : most likely the best ouverture of all ouvertures ever made, 18th century purest form of Rock & Roll avant la lettre :
When the Roman Catholic Church meets Ferrari meets the "Left", what do you get ? Because that's in a nutshell what is currently happening in Italy, "progressive" forces seeking change and joining forces. At first sight, they truly make an odd couple trio. Mind you, the majority of Maranello based Ferrari employees ...
A couple of days ago, blogger Bruce Krasting (fx) had a nice story on the Japanese Yen. "The full name for what is familiarly known as JA is Japan Short Anonymous (JSA). The group is patterned off of AA or Alcoholics Anonymous (many JA members are also in AA). The only qualifications for joining JA are the loss of a great ...
...and it's all about plan B, AKA "The Great Escape". There has been some speculation going on lately on how our monetary policy makers intend to normalize the unusual situation where we are in right now. Some - and probably helicopter Ben included - argue that it can become even more unusual in view of the fact that things are not ...
"Never underestimate the power of denial" - Ricky Fitts, American Beauty . It has been a while we reported on the European sovereign debt crisis so we thought it being appropriate to give a quick update. Greece finally has secured a new deal with the Troika but no new haircuts are involved. So no new debt relief. We ...
"Belgian budgets are rarely an example of elegance. But the numbers do fit !!" - A Belgian budget minister wearing a beard serving under Verhofstadt's Purple I cabinet At last we managed to produce some kind of federal budget. But whether we should cheer our government coming out of conclave, is a different matter. ...
At 5 AM this morning, it became clear that Barack Obama got his democratic legitimacy to carry on for a second term in the White House. It was a close call although most likely the final result in terms of votes might even indicate a landslide victory, depending on swing states such as Ohio, Florida and Virginia (if he holds onto ...
The Belgian 2013 budget debate resumes and it seems that once again we encounter a steeple chase with lots of water bassins and people from all pressure groups pre-emptively closing several options. The objective of this year's exercise is to find EUR 3.7 bio and to lower the budget deficit to -2.15% of GDP at Europe's request. My ...
In the age of new-speak and political lexicon, the Dutch show us the way by banning that ugly austerity word and replacing it by a more social acceptable term like "modernization" and "building bridges". And above "de moerdijk", that implies some EUR 16 bio of "modern" savings, ie EUR 1,000/capita or roughly 2,5% of GDP. In the ...
According to the World Economic Forum, Canadian banks have been ranked as the soundest and most safe banks world-wide, this for 5 years in a row. Toronto Dominion Bank, the country's second largest lender, is the only publicly traded lender in the world which still carries a AAA label from Moody's (for what that's worth of ...
Over the last couple of months, we have been focusing on "frothy" housing market bubbles in various pockets around the world, down under and in the West. And we have been focusing as well on the age of financial repression meaning zero interest rates, and what to do with our money, me, you, our pension fund. Today we will have a ...
Independent of the second presidential TV debate and its outcome, we can safely say that most of US elections are won or lost on the economic track record of the incumbent president. Remember "It's the economy, stupid". And the last couple of days, a strong attack has been launched on Obama by a set of Romney advisers , ie Glenn ...
You may remember I wrote a piece on Asia Pacific Breweries (APB) , Heineken and Fraser & Neave (F&N) when I was in Singapore earlier this year (March 6th to be exact). I had just visited the high-tech APB plant in Singapore and left very impressed with their activities and unique positioning ...
My dear friend Sideshow Bob sent me a short note which I think deserves some attention. It opens up the discussion on one of the most ancient forms of trading, dating from the days money did not exist. It seems we have a kind of barter revival on our hands. But let's have Sideshow Bob kicking off the discussion : The Chinese ...
The age of financial repression is going global these days. And it hence shouldn't come as a surprise that large pension funds are not really happy with what monetary policy is fabricating in terms of QE and interest rates. As a consequence, some re-allocations are taking place. Yesterday, the news came in that Japan's Teacher's ...
Sunday's big easy and two stories for the weekly wrap up. First of all Sweden, being the first big European economy to engage on economic stimulus, afraid that the global slow-down will have a strong impact on the economy due to its international exposure (exports 36% of GDP). So as a head start, the government decided to boost ...
Today Wolfgang Munchau in the FT focuses on QE European style and why an Anglo-saxon style QE would be to be preferred. Now I would like to focus on the first part because Munchau has a very good point here, something which we recently have stressed and focused upon in another framework, cfr ...
Before taking on the most important latest novelty - the main dish - a short appetizer on 2 items which also to a great extend stress the dangers of systemic risk still present today : 1) Yesterday the central bank of New Zealand urged its most important financial players to speed up their capital adequacy requirements : ...
Apparently we have some translation problems at the press communication desk of the ECB, more specifically the department English/Spanish. When the ECB last week launched its so-called bazooka, the message was nevertheless quite clear in plain English : With respect to governments and unlimited buying of government bonds, ...
Before giving a brief comment on what has been decided upon today, a quick quiz show. Who is quoted for the following statement earlier this week : "Markets are not allowed to run wild and must serve the people rather than the other way around. When we look at international markets over the last five years, then we see that ...
That were Mario Draghi's concluding remarks speaking before European Parliament in Brussels earlier this week. Again by times a clever effort following his Zeit open letter last week where some more psychological pressure was put onto the German people. Let's see what his main message was in order to know what we can expect next ...
...let's carry on then with the same treatment. This is usually a classic when you have tried everything to cure a patient with standard methods and everything fails. Or even more extreme in the House MD variation on this theme :"If it works, we were right, if he dies it was something else". But all in all, this was the ...
Over the past couple weeks - in facts months - we have been blogging on the future of the euro-zone and on the economic and political rationale behind recent developments. And the response in the sequential blog debates was rich and interesting to say the least, looked upon from all various angles and for which I would like to ...
We have seen some remarkable shifts lately on the German political front. Yesterday, Frau Merkel wistled back its CSU coalition partner after an interview in Der Spiegel which was rather unfriendly towards Mario Draghi and Greece. In addition, in her ARD appearance, Frau Merkel was remarkably in favor of the ESM rescue ...
A lot of scenarios have circulated ever since the Greek debt crisis escalated and we got contagion into the Mediterranean periphery. And all these elements were related to bailouts, fiscal consequences of bailouts on core European countries (eg possible eurobonds etc), too big to bail (Spain/Italy) and rescue funds, whether or not ...
It seems that the announcement effect of EMU bond buying did not miss its purpose when looking at how the risk-on status of the market performed over the past 4 or 5 weeks. And it is of course not restricted to equity markets world-wide, the return numbers on various European sovereigns are very impressive indeed to say the ...
Well we had quite a colorful US morning session yesterday. In the first half hour after the opening bell, an algo trading program went bananas affecting some 148 stocks amongst which some very big names. For more info on this we refer to
