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calculatedrisk.blogspot.com - 11/10/2008

The Commercial Real Estate Bust

— calculatedrisk.blogspot.com — Since investment in non-residential structures is slowing (especially malls, hotels, and offices), a key question is how did the commercial real estate (CRE) investment boom compare to the residential housing bubble? And how did the CRE boom compare ... (more) The Commercial Real Estate Bust

Gross Domestic Product

Comments vote downundo vote up The Aleph Blog found this 11/10/2008found this

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nakedcapitalism.com - 11/12/2008

"The first casualty of the crisis: Iceland"

— nakedcapitalism.com — For those of you who only caught bits and snippets of the Iceland crisis, this VoxEU post by J on Danielsson provides a useful recap. And if you are familiar with broad outlines of the unravelling, the piece also recaps the policy errors that fed ... (more) "The first casualty of the crisis: Iceland"

Currencies

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"The first casualty of the crisis: Iceland"
naked capitalism — ... for example, will not slow down inflation on good imported from the EU. Once you have read this piece for background, do go and read the excellent article by Willem Buiter and Anne Siebert (which Danielsson references), who were invited in by Iceland to analyze their situation while the crisis was developing, and were asked to keep their paper confidential because it would be inflammatory. Now that the worst has past, they are free to publish their work. Back to VoxEU: Iceland’s banking system is ruined. GDP is down 65% in euro terms. ...

Spot of Swiss
FT Alphaville — Switzerland’s famous for chocolate, cheese, knives, neutrality and banking . It’s the latter that could problematic. From VoxEU : Citi Chart In this crisis, the strength of a bank’s balance sheet is of little consequence. What matters is the explicit or implicit guarantee provided by the state to the banks to back up their assets and provide liquidity. Therefore, the size of the state relative to the size of the banks becomes the crucial factor.  If the banks become too big to save, their failure becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. That has some commentators worries, most notably, Felix Salmon at ...

Microblog 2008-11-16
Overlawyered — Tenth anniversary of Great Tobacco Robbery settlement of 1998 [NPR series all week h/t @billchilds; Carter Wood at PoL here, here, here, and here] # No need for “socialism” with endless bailouts instead [George Will, David Brooks] # Rude name for “age-restricted” (no-kids) housing developments: “vasectomy zoning” [Dr. Wes] # Iceland’s national financial calamity [Robert Jackson, Financial Times; Jon Danielsson, VoxEU] # World gone mad dept.: Saudi ...

Iceland applies for EU membership, the outcome is uncertain
VoxEU.org: Recent Articles — The Icelandic parliament, by the narrowest of margins and broadly on party lines, has just decided to apply for EU membership. If the application is successful and approved by a referendum, Iceland might join the EU in four years. However, serious obstacles, both domestically and within the EU, make the eventual outcome quite uncertain. Domestic opposition Iceland enjoys an auxiliary membership in the EU, as a member of the European Economic Area (EEA), which gives it many of the benefits of membership including access to markets and labour mobility. At the same time, the majority of the population has consistently opposed EU ...

Iceland warms to Europe
VoxEU.org: Recent Articles — It took a crash. Iceland s recent application for EU membership signals that Iceland s new government understands the country s need to show its willingness to share its sovereignty with other EU members and to subject itself to the discipline that full EU and EMU membership entails. Iceland s application is overdue. The natural thing for Iceland to do would have been to join the EU with Austria, Finland, and Sweden in 1995 rather than let European Economic Area membership suffice and forgo the benefits of full integration. Norway had a good, if selfish, reason to remain outside the EU oil. Some believed that Iceland s riches ...