Word: economisters
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Sure enough, house prices stopped rising in 2006, and now banks and brokerages are taking huge write-downs tied to the mortgage-backed instruments that kept the Ponzi-loan machine oiled. Economists are furiously debating whether we're on the brink of a full-fledged "Minsky moment," in which lending shrinks sharply across the board. Nouriel Roubini, an NYU economist and a widely read forecaster, got a lot of attention in November by professing to see risk of "generalized meltdown of the financial system of a severity and magnitude like we have never observed before." That sounds bad. But even...
...equaled 55% of income in the U.S.; now it's above 114% (and above 136% of after-tax disposable income). The middle class--households earning roughly between $20,000 and $100,000 annually--had a debt-to-income ratio of 141% in 2004, according to New York University (NYU) economist Edward Wolff. And he figures it's even higher today. In the third quarter of 2005, the national savings rate (personal income minus spending) went negative for the first time since the Great Depression, and it has bounced back only slightly since...
Hyman Minsky, an academic economist who died in relative obscurity in 1996 but is now the talk of Wall Street, had a colorful phrase to describe such people: "Ponzi borrowers," he called them, after the early 20th century pyramid-scheme perpetrator Charles Ponzi. Minsky argued that once banks got so sloppy that they handed out Ponzi loans, a financial crisis was inevitable...
...determination to remain a slave to oil, the oil industry may well have hit a point when the short term is the long term--every barrel not pumped today will be worth more tomorrow. "The Venezuelans are investing as much as they want to," says economist Mark Weisbrot, a co-director of the Center for Economic Policy and Research in Washington. "That is, they're not in a hurry at all to expand production...
...with them. Abandoning its Petrozuata and Hamaca heavy-oil ventures, plus an offshore project, cost Conoco $4.5 billion in impairment charges. The French oil corporation Total signed a deal earlier this month to help fill the void. Still, Venezuela's output "is declining," says Rafael Quiroz, an oil economist at Venezuela's Central University. "If it dips below 2.1 m.b.d. ... it could bankrupt the industry...