international investment position

Cyprus Rescue

30 March 2013

Cyprus has recently received the attention of academicians and financial professionals in recent weeks. Need I say that? So national bankruptcy is to be resolved by winding down a bank, moving guaranteed deposits (i.e., upto €100,000) to another and as per the latest Reuters article on this, big numbers (anywhere ranging from 20 to 40 per [...]

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Not A Balance-Of-Payments Crisis?

27 October 2012

Here’s a new piece by Randall Wray on Economonitor claiming current accounts do not matter (once again!) and didn’t have much of a role on the Euro Area crisis. Part of his arguments are the same as those who participated in public debates 1991 (most, not all) and claimed the balance-of-payments doesn’t matter. Perhaps he should [...]

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U.S. Net Indebtedness Above $5T Now

27 June 2012

The BEA reported yesterday that the U.S. Net International Investment Position at the end of 2011 was minus $4,030.3bn. The large change compared to the end of 2010 (where it was -$2,473.6bn) was due to large revaluations of assets and liabilities in addition to the current account deficit. See the BEA blog on this. For [...]

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Downplaying TARGET2 Imbalances

13 June 2012

Beate Reszat has written a very nice article on TARGET2 Target2 – Q&A which should be read by anyone interested. The article seems to be in response to a speech by George Soros earlier this month in Italy. The link appears in her post and the relevant section of the transcript quoted. Although it is a [...]

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Cyprus Seeking Bailout

2 June 2012

According to a Wall Street Journal article from yesterday Cyprus Seen Close to a Request for Bailout, Cyprus (2011 GDP: €18bn approximately) is set to become the fourth Euro Area nation to seek a bailout after Greece, Ireland and Portugal. According to the WSJ: Late last year, the country negotiated a €2.5 billion ($3.1 billion) bilateral loan [...]

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The Monetary Economics Of Sovereign Government Rating

4 May 2012

If a government (outside monetary unions) can make a draft at the central bank, why do rating agencies rate governments’ creditworthiness? In this post, I will attempt to describe the dynamics of defaults and restructurings by going through some monetary economics of open economies. Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff wrote a book in 2009 titled This [...]

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Exorbitant Privilege

18 March 2012

My last post was on U.S. net income payments from abroad and how it continues to be in the favour of the United States. The late Wynne Godley had been analyzing this since 1994. In an article titled U.S. Trade Deficits: The Recovery’s Dark Side?, written with William Milberg, he had a section called “Foreign indebtedness and the [...]

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Balance Of Payments: Part 1

8 March 2012

This is the first part of a series of posts I intend to write on the “rest of the world” accounts in National Accounts. This blog is about looking at economies from the point of view of National Accounts, Cambridge Keynesianism and Horizontalism. While various descriptions of balance of payments exist, most of them simply [...]

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€2.2 Trillion

6 March 2012

Found this graph at this hilarious blog which quotes Diapason Research. The graph plotted by the researchers uses cumulative current account balances from IMF’s data. I instead directly used the Net International Investment Position at the end of Q3 2011 from Eurostat. The blue bars plot the net indebtedness of each EA17 nation (with signs reversed) and [...]

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Deutsche Bundesbank’s TARGET2 Claims

5 March 2012

Yesterday Wolfgang Münchau wrote an article in the Financial Times The Bundesbank has no right at all to be baffled in which he gave his opinion about Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann’s leaked letter to the European Central Bank President  Mario Draghi expressing concerns on the Bundesbank’s TARGET2 assets. According to the Bundesbank December 2011 Monthly Report, its claims on [...]

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