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On 6 October, when the European Union (EU) agreed to impose a Russian oil price cap as part of a new package of sanctions against Moscow, 23 oil ministers from the OPEC+ group of oil-producing countries spoke out in favor of a sharp cut in their joint production quota. Their collective decision to decrease output by about two million barrels of oil per day elicited strong reactions in the US in particular, and there was even talk of “declarations of war.” The EU feels duped, as the OPEC+ production cuts could drive up fuel prices and dampen their eight sanctions...

NEW YORK, August 24, 2015 — Global Finance magazine has named the heads of the Central Banks of the Czech Republic, the European Union, India, Israel, Malaysia, Paraguay, Peru, the Philippines, and Taiwan as the World’s Best Central Bankers over the past year, in recognition of their achievement of a prestigious “A” grade on Global Finance’s Central Banker Report Cards. August 24, 2015 In addition, the Central Bankers of Colombia, Saudi Arabia and the United States earned “A-” grades. The Central Banker Report Cards, published annually by Global Finance since 1994, grade the central bank governors of nearly 75 key...

Japan has drawn criticism for its moves to weaken the yen against the U.S. dollar. NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — The Group of 20 finance ministers and central bank governors on Saturday pledged to monitor negative currency spillovers to other countries caused by monetary policies implemented for domestic purposes. “We will refrain from competitive devaluation,” the G-20 said at its meeting in Moscow. The G-20 fell short of any direct action related specifically to Japan, which has drawn criticism for policy moves that have caused the yen to lose 17.5% against the dollar in five months. See: Michael Casey's FX Horizons

One Dam Metaphor For The 2012 Global Financial SystemJanuary 30, 2012Charles Hugh Smith What do you do when flood waters threaten the dam? If you're the Federal Reserve, you close the floodgates and let the water rise. Metaphors have an uncanny ability to capture the essence of complex situations. Here is one dam metaphor that distills and explains the entire global financial system in 2012. The way to visualize the current situation is to imagine a dam holding back rising storm waters. The dam is the regulatory system, the rule of law, trust in the transparency and fairness of the...

NICOLE GELINAS Global Finance’s State of Nature Ambitions for a new world order are no match for national interest. Sarkozy put pressure on us,” reports a nonplussed banker to a colleague in a recent French-newspaper cartoon, referring to the French president’s campaign against financial-industry bonuses. “And then what?” his colleague asks. “And then nothing,” is the reply. /snip National leaders are, in effect, competing over which country can offer its financial sector the most generous economic subsidy. This losing game ultimately hurts the financial sector—which needs market discipline to reward success and punish failure—and economic competitiveness as well. /snip Continuing...

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) has introduced legislation that would "bar the dollar from being replace by any foreign currency." A statement from Bachmann's website:

U.S. officials turning up pressure on Europe to boost stimulusLONDON (MarketWatch) -- Don't look for the world's most powerful economic policy makers to come up with a sweeping prescription for a deepening global recession when they gather this weekend in southern England.The meeting of finance ministers and central bankers from the world's 20 largest industrialized and emerging economies Friday and Saturday at a luxury hotel near Brighton comes amid a growing disagreement between the United States and Europe over Washington's call for additional government spending to rev up slumping global demand. 'The possibility that the upcoming [G20] meeting could provide...

Barack Obama is Destroying Our Economy on Purpose. A pair of radical Columbia University professors by the name of Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven wrote an article in the radical magazine known as The Nation. The article was published on May 2, 1966 and laid out what is now known as the "Cloward-Piven Strategy". The plan calls for the destruction of capitalism in America by swelling the welfare rolls to the point of collapsing our economy and then implementing socialism by nationalizing many private institutions. Cloward and Piven studied Saul Alinsky just like Hillary Clinton and President Obama....

The world is suffering through the worst financial crisis since the 1930s, a crisis that has precipitated a sharp downturn in the global economy. Its fundamental causes remain in dispute. In my view, however, it is impossible to understand this crisis without reference to the global imbalances in trade and capital flows that began in the latter half of the 1990s. In the simplest terms, these imbalances reflected a chronic lack of saving relative to investment in the United States and some other industrial countries, combined with an extraordinary increase in saving relative to investment in many emerging market nations....

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke stressed Tuesday that major financial institutions would not be allowed to fail given the fragile state of financial markets and the global economy. In a speech in Washington, Bernanke repeated that a sustainable economic recovery will "remain out of reach" until the banking sector is stabilized. A recovery later this year is not out of the question, Bernanke said. ************************* 'It was the...collapse of banks and other institutions in late 1930 and early 1931 that made the Great Depression great.' — Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke

Barack Obama’s top economic adviser has urged world leaders to pump more public money into the economy in a co-ordinated effort to boost demand and lift the world out of recession.In an interview with the Financial Times, Lawrence Summers said the urgent need for a short-term increase in spending by governments temporarily overrode the longer-term goal of tackling the global imbalances many economists believe caused the financial crisis. The US administration had no choice but to take strong public action to “save the market system from its own excesses”, he said.His comments, ahead of next month’s crunch G20 summit in...

An excerpt from the second paragraph: "The IMF . . . is suggesting governments adopt a 'binding code of conduct across nations' to coordinate how and when they would intercede in troubled firms, and how to share losses from major financial institutions that operate across borders." From further down in the article: ". . .the IMF is endorsing a G-20 idea to have financial firms overseen by 'colleges of supervisors'--essentially regulators from a financial firm's home country and other countries where it does business." more at the link.

'Run on UK' sees foreign investors pull $1 trillion out of the City http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/run-on-uk-sees-foreign-investors-pull-1-trillion-out-of-the-city-1639413.html

Chief executives of leading banks from Japan, Europe and the United States will meet in London to discuss regulation of the financial sector, according to a report. The British government will host the talks on March 24, ahead of an April summit of Group of 20 leaders, the Nikkei economic daily said, without naming sources. Invitations have been sent to the chiefs of leading institutions including US-based JPMorgan Chase and Co. and British bank HSBC, it said.

SANTA MONICA, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- There's a $700 trillion elephant in the room and it's time we found out how much it really weighs on the economy. Derivative contracts total about three-quarters of a quadrillion dollars in "notional" amounts, according to the Bank for International Settlements. These contracts are tallied in notional values because no one really can say how much they are worth. But valuing them correctly is exactly what we should be doing because these comprise the viral disease that has infected the financial markets and the economies of the world. Try as we might to salvage the...

by Peter Hördahl (Extract from pages 10-11 of BIS Quarterly Review, March 2009) In recent months, break-even inflation rates, ie the difference between yields on nominal and real bonds, have been abnormally volatile, falling to unprecedentedly low levels before recovering somewhat in early 2009. The US 10-year break-even rate, for example, dropped to almost zero in late 2008 after having remained relatively stable at around 2.5% over the past several years (Graph A, left-hand panel). A similar pattern, albeit less pronounced, has been seen in euro area break-even rates (Graph A, centre panel). A natural question to ask is: to...

HONG KONG -- Hong Kong's financial secretary has ordered regulators to study how to reconcile Muslim financial rules with local laws in hopes of launching a market for Islamic bonds, according to a speech transcript reviewed Tuesday. Secretary John Tsang said he hopes to promote Hong Kong, a popular stock market for Chinese companies, as a gateway for Middle Eastern investment in China, according to transcripts from a Monday speech at a financial conference. "Islamic finance is an important element of the global financial system," he said. "For Hong Kong to be a major international financial center — not just...

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is John B. Taylor, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor of economics at Stanford............... ...................... ........He is the author of the new book Global Financial Warriors: The Untold Story of International Finance in the Post 9/11 World. FP: John B. Taylor, welcome to Frontpage Interview. Taylor: I really appreciate the invitation. Thank you. .......... FP: Tell us a bit about the success on the financial front in the war on terror. How come we don’t hear about it?