Is China’s Bubble the Next Financial Crisis?

By Mark Whitehouse – The Chinese credit boom has rapidly turned the country into one of the developing world’s most indebted, according to a new report (pdf) from London’s Centre for Economic Policy Research.

Such credit-fueled growth can’t be sustained for long without causing major distortions and setting the country up for a fall.

The stimulus is already running into diminishing returns. Over the five years through 2013, government and private debt grew by about 3 yuan for each added yuan of economic activity, a level of credit intensity that the U.S. exceeded only in the years leading up to the 2008 crisis. more> http://tinyurl.com/k5985du

Big Banks Face Another Round of U.S. Charges

By Ben Protess and Jessica Silver-Greenberg – With evidence mounting that a number of foreign and American banks colluded to alter the price of foreign currencies, the largest and least regulated financial market, prosecutors are aiming to file charges against at least one bank by the end of the year.

Yet the breadth of the suspected wrongdoing in the currency inquiry — Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Barclays and UBS are among the dozen or so banks under investigation — might distinguish it from the piecemeal nature of the crisis-era investigations. more> http://tinyurl.com/msouwc6

The Rise And Fall And Rise And Fall Of King Dollar, Part 2

BOOK REVIEW

Wealth of Nations, Author: Adam Smith.

Money, Gold, and History, Author: Lewis E. Lehrman.

The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Author: John Maynard Keynes.

By Ralph Benko – The mechanics of the reserve currency system preempt these funds’ ready availability for “the maintenance of industry.”

The mechanics of the dollar as a reserve asset, therefore, finance bigger government while insidiously preempting productivity, jobs, and equitable prosperity.

As Steve Forbes pithily puts it, “You’ve got to get the money right.” 

Time to lift the reserve currency curse. Time to fix the dollar. more> http://tinyurl.com/men5vk7

Related>

• The Rise And Fall And Rise And Fall Of King Dollar
• The Demonization Of American Capitalism, Jonathan Adelman, Forbes

Your Debt, Our Nation’s Headache

By Barry Ritholtz – Assets purchased with cheap and widely available credit become worth significantly less once the bubble bursts. But the debt remains.

All of that leverage used to purchase all of those assets — regardless of whether it’s subprime mortgages or dot-com stocks — sticks around.

Hence, a post-credit-crisis recovery is dominated not by the release of pent-up demand, but by massive corporate, household and government deleveraging. more> http://tinyurl.com/pryw54s

Related>

• Warning Flags in the Stock Market, A. Gary Shilling, Bloomberg
• Rocket’s Fizzled IPO May Pop Europe’s Tech Bubble, Leonid Bershidsky, Bloomberg
• Wall Street Pays Its Workers to Suffer, Noah Smith, Bloomberg

The Rise And Fall And Rise And Fall Of King Dollar

BOOK REVIEW

Money: How the Destruction of the Dollar Threatens the Global Economy and What We Can Do About It, Authors: Steve Forbes and Elizabeth Ames.

The Money Trap, Author: Robert Pringle.

By Ralph Benko – We live in a world monetary system that makes the U.S. dollar its official reserve currency.

About 60%  of international central bank reserves are Yankee dollars. Some, both right and left, in America and abroad, consider the reserve currency status of the dollar a bug in the software of our world monetary system.

Getting this fixed is, in the opinion of some consequential thinkers, of capital importance for the generation of quality jobs, and equitable prosperity, in America and the world. more> http://tinyurl.com/kgmlxya