Crash Survival Zone

Hayman Advisors LP, the firm that earned $500 million betting on the U.S. subprime mortgage-market collapse, says Europe’s monetary union is about to fall apart.

Richard Howard, a managing director for global markets at Dallas-based Hayman, said Germany may opt to shore up its own economy, Europe’s biggest, rather than bail out fellow euro nations such [...]

By Robert J. Samuelson

Judged by his own standards, President Obama’s $787 billion economic stimulus program is deeply disappointing. For weeks, Obama has described the economy in grim terms. “This is not your ordinary run-of-the-mill recession,” he said at his Feb. 9 news conference. It’s “the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.” Given these dire [...]

Joschka Fischer, the former German vice-chancellor, has issued a bleak assessment of Europe’s prospects for surviving the financial crisis, warning that leaders of a “self-weakening” continent are failing to come to grips with its decline.

“Modern capitalism is based on a global ponzi scheme,” he said. “There is no quick fix to this very severe crisis. [...]

Manufacturers are hoping to ride out the worst U.S. and global economic storm in decades, but some fear that more pain lies ahead as demand plummets and a recovery could be tentative at best.

Executives at the Reuters Manufacturing Summit in Chicago this week characterized the near-term outlook and the velocity and time of a recovery [...]

They’re all Keynesians for now.

Faced with an economy reeling from the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, executives at the Reuters Manufacturing Summit in Chicago this week largely backed the deficit spending spree lately embarked upon by the U.S. government.

It is an interventionist approach that owes much to John Maynard Keynes, the liberal economist [...]

No one knows how long this U.S. recession will last, nor how bad it might get.

But few executives who spoke at this week’s Reuters Manufacturing and Transportation Summit in Chicago expect that when the U.S. economy emerges from its morass there will be the easy credit and high leverage that fueled the recent boom — [...]

The U.S. economy contracted at a staggering 6.2 per cent pace at the end of 2008, the worst showing in a quarter-century, as consumers and businesses ratcheted back spending, plunging the country deeper into recession.

The U.S. Commerce Department report released Friday showed the economy sinking much faster than the 3.8 per cent annualized drop for [...]

Harvard economic historian Niall Ferguson predicts prolonged financial hardship, even civil war, before the ‘Great Recession’ ends
Harvard author and financial crisis guru Niall Ferguson has landed with a thud in Ottawa, spreading messages that could make even the most confident policy makers squirm.

The global crisis is far from over, has only just begun, and Canada [...]

Proclaiming a “once in a generation” opportunity, President Obama proposed a 10-year budget on Thursday that reflects his determination in the face of recession to invest trillions of dollars and his own political capital in reshaping the nation’s priorities.

Mr. Obama would overhaul health care, begin to arrest global warming, expand the federal role in education [...]

The budget that President Obama proposed on Thursday is nothing less than an attempt to end a three-decade era of economic policy dominated by the ideas of Ronald Reagan and his supporters.
The Obama budget — a bold, even radical departure from recent history, wrapped in bureaucratic f
ormality and statistical tables — would sharply raise taxes [...]