Posts Tagged ‘Default’
Money in my Pocket
Total debt service payments as percentage of disposable income have fallen from a peak of 14.1% in 7/07 to just 10.6% today, a level last seen in 10/93; a decline of 25%. This is due to a combination of low interest rates, rising disposable income, and lots of mortgage defaults, which have reduced household debt…
Read MoreMoral Hazard
Ideally Greece would leave the Euro, default on its debts, and get on with its economic existence. But, leaving the Euro would be a disaster for the Euro zone. So the Europeans won’t let it happen. Neither will the Chinese as they do not want the US Dollar to be the only reserve currency. Since…
Read MoreIcelandic Luck
The gov’t of Iceland wasn’t smart. It just couldn’t afford to bail out its banks, so they failed and foreign creditors including the UK and the Netherlands got badly burned, to the tune of $6 billion. While Iceland has suffered, their economic performance has been fabulous compared to Greece, Ireland or Portugal. The lesson, bailing…
Read MoreGreek Tragedy
The Greek 10-yr gov’t bond yield is 14.7%, 11.5% above comparable German bonds. The 2-yr Greek note is trading at 22.2%, 20.45 % above the German 2-yr note. The cost of insuring Greek sovereign bonds jumped to 1,422 basis points based on the Bloomberg London 5-yr credit default swap. These swap prices signal more than…
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