Students of behavioral finance must have had a field day this past week. In the wake of a month of dismal economic reports, Wall Street got its risk on with a few better than expected reports on manufacturing sentiment, home sales, and employment. Hopium, it appears, is a powerful drug.

As Canadians sparred over fake lakes, budget-busting security, and the global capitalist conspiracy, the world’s twenty most influential leaders convened in Toronto this past June to negotiate a response to the worst financial crisis in generations. At issue was an age old debate between two economic philosophies: stimulus as a life vest versus stimulus as a straitjacket. The pro-life camp was championed by consumerist America and its global supply chain. The pro-restraint camp was led by conservative Germany and its regional demand chain. At risk were millions of jobs, trillions in debt, and quite possibly the fate of our modern political economy.

Armies of bulls and bears are camped out on either side of the great debate over the future of the global economy. Armed with the latest statistics and plenty of financial incentive, both sides are engaged in massive media campaigns to rally anyone left on the fence — principally retail investors who were either burned in the great collapse of 2008-09 or sat out the fast and furious rally over the past 14 months. As the rhetoric heats up, it becomes increasingly difficult to choose sides. A careful examination of these competing wagers provides a more holistic perspective for anyone brave enough to join the fight.

Mr. Dollar testified before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission today about the challenges of a self-regulating market and the dangers that lie ahead. While his belief in free market capitalism remains unshaken, Greenspan’s warnings about the key attributes that should underpin a stable banking system — adequate capitalization, liquidity, and regulatory oversight — cast a surprising shot across the bow of modern banking giants who have grown a little too comfortable with their bailout blanket and artificially low interest rates.

From daily solar cycles to quarterly seasonal changes to the 130,000-year lapse between Ice Ages, our world is filled with natural ebbs and flows. Those that try to forecast the future by studying these longer sweeping patterns are often accused of being out of touch, relying on the distant past for established wisdom rather than embracing contemporary optimism that “this time is different“. In this essay in Foreign Affairs, Niall Ferguson reminds us that America is just as vulnerable to collapse as the many great civilizations that preceded it — maybe even more so given the increasing complexity of our modern global economy…

“Zapatero is not a good driver. It’s like a boat, which in calm waters steers fine, but when it gets bumpy, they are not prepared.” The same could be said for many of the world’s C-level leaders, so it’s perhaps not surprising that both companies and countries are finding out the hard way that credit can dry up when the sea gets choppy…

A perennial hot ticket on the lecture circuit at economic clubs and grad schools around the planet, Paul Volcker‘s influence is finally starting to resonate where it counts: at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. As his testimony in front of the Senate Banking Committee looms, the broader premise of a more responsible financial services sector pursuing sustainable, profitable growth needs to get out in clear journalistic prose from a messenger untarnished by the last 18 months of political and economic triage. This Sunday NYTimes op-ed attempts to do just that, despite the complexity of the topic. Unfortunately, it falls a little short for those either too stubborn or greedy to listen or too impatient to digest his astute commentary on …

As rare proof that not all ex-Goldman bankers are great vampire squids wrapped around the face of humanity, Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney turns his gaze toward households as the holidays approach with some keen macro observations and their implications for micro decision-making. Though the central bank recently raised flags about Canadian household finances and talk of a real estate bubble has begun to resurface, this public address seems measured both in its observations and its conclusions, and reflects well on the current poster child of responsible 21st century monetary governance…

For all its flaws, one of the great strengths of the American political system is the degree to which competing perspectives fight to the death in Washington’s marketplace of ideas. A perfect example is the recent exchange between Senate Banking Committee member (and Baseball Hall of Famer) Jim Bunning and his monetary nemesis Fed Chairman Bernanke on the eve of a controversial re-nomination…

Commentators often question how recent events in global capital markets could possibly sneak up on the world’s leading economists and policymakers. One possible explanation begins with the premise that the average citizen is reasonably unaware of even the most basic financial and economic concepts – like fractional reserve banking and the time value of money. As a result, generations of otherwise sophisticated individuals have grown up trusting that our economic plumbing and the individuals who manage it are fundamentally sound.

Much like the shifting partisan politics which rules Washington in 2- to 4-year cycles, stewardship of the Federal Reserve has ebbed and flowed between neo-Keynsians and Austrians since the birth of American central banking nearly 90 years ago. Two of the Fed’s greatest leaders and keenest minds have crafted American monetary policy for most of the last three decades, and yet they couldn’t be more different.
This is their story.

This type of geopolitical conspiracy would be easy to dismiss from any other source, but speculation of an imminent de-dollarization by some of the world’s largest oil consumers is even more chilling when it’s penned by one of Britain’s most celebrated international journalists…

Exploring the recent economic “upheaval” through the lens of history helps in at least two ways: 1) it assures us that humanity has faced similar dangers in the past and somehow lived to tell the tale, and 2) it suggests that the same entrepreneurial instincts that led us into trouble (yet again) also hold the key to restoring stability and growth. This speech by the President of the World Bank highlights a series of events that presaged the crisis — like the “emergence” of emerging economies, the popularity of leveraged finance, and growing imbalances of trade — focusing less on the outcome and more on the decades of unbridled expansion that inspired it…

A comprehensive if somewhat subjective view of the two years since the credit crisis first broke, direct from the horse’s mouth. Perhaps more interesting than any insider account of the Fed’s frantic response to the meltdown of the banking system is the degree to which the Chairman was concerned with the human impact of his macroeconomic policy-making…

Armchair financial quarterbacks would do well to tune out the mass media every so often and tune into the real global dialogue on the nature of the recent crisis and our prospects for a sustainable recovery. It is no coincidence that those whose perspective is truly global consider the fundamental nature of our modern political economy in terms of decades not days, systems not statistics, and welfare not wealth.
In this speech, given just weeks before the March 2008 arranged marriage of Bear Stearns and JPMorgan, this banker to central bankers dissects the credit crisis of 2007 and calls attention to dangerous fault-lines that presaged the apocalyptic deleveraging of the next 18 months…

In the midst of a global financial pandemic, private enterprise finds itself under the public microscope yet again — as it did during the 1930s after a century of unbridled growth and later in the 1970s after decades of stifling regulatory oversight. With this 21st century changing of the guard, the theoretical bases for free market capitalism are now under academic and legislative review. At the heart of the debate is the accuracy of the economic models taught to college students around the planet as though they were immutable physical laws.

For nearly a quarter century, Milton Friedman’s monetarists and their acolytes at the Federal Reserve have pursued American prosperity on the assumption that the sheer quantity of money in the economy, along with the degree to which it turns over annually, are the principal levers shaping macroeconomic fundamentals. For the better part of the 20th century that assumption held true as money supply was carefully managed, rising when the economy needed a boost and contracting when it was overheating.
The theory draws its roots from a colossal failure by the Federal Reserve during the Great Depression.

This counter-factual analysis of China’s path toward capitalism reveals that the country’s biggest cities aren’t necessarily the engines of dynamic Asian progress that modern commentators have suggested, and that the country’s future may lie in rural areas where entrepreneurship and competition have thrived since Deng Xiaoping’s Four Modernizations…

Faith in the underlying mechanics of portfolio theory and market efficiency has certainly contributed to humanity’s recent leap forward in wealth, productivity, private innovation, and global integration. But that same numerology has since crippled our aging financial system and triggered the worst global recession in nearly a century. Perhaps it’s time to reassess the value – and the logic – of bleeding edge finance.
As Professor Janeway points out in the following interview, treating securities like molecules, subject to the same variable distributions, “random walks”, differential equations, and reductionist math simply compounds the short-sighted actions of a few scientists-turned-gamblers. Not only does it greatly overstate the predictive power of econometric analysis, but it also understates the tremendous dangers of financial engineering. …

Keynesian reflections from 1919 on the first era of true globalization, complete with bountiful trade, unparalleled upward mobility, liquid labor markets, secure international travel, and a blissful ignorance of the fragility of this new 20th Century World Order…
What an extraordinary episode in the economic progress of man that age was which came to an end in August 1914! The greater part of the population, it is true, worked hard and lived at a low standard of comfort, yet were, to all appearances, reasonably contented with this lot. But escape was possible, for any man of capacity or character at all exceeding the average, into the middle and upper classes, for whom life offered, at a low cost and with the …