China is getting into car manufacture in a big way, but before going further with this, let me sidetrack you to another article in today’s FT. Here you will find two interesting details. Firstly, according to Arthur Kroeber, of China Economic Quarterly, ?Since 2003, China has gone from being a net importer of capital [...]

In some ways I think this story may run and run over the months to come. Bloomberg have an update on their earlier article. According to the latest account:
1/. The German Finance Ministry have declined to comment on the Stern report that discussions took place last week between Finance Minister Hans Eichel, Bundesbank President Axel [...]

The Washington Times (of all places) carries a UPI text about a Deutsch Bank research note on the economic consequences of the French ‘no’:
“France’s rejection of the European Union constitutional treaty by a majority of 54.9 percent is a severe blow to European integration and threatens to depress European economy back into eurosclerosis as in [...]

What, you may ask, has Italian government debt got to do with the French ‘no’ vote: everything would be my answer. (If you want to know more about this, thumb down my euro posts). The lack of a convincing advance towards political union makes Italian government debt riskier, so they have to pay more interest. [...]

Oh come on, it’s Friday afternoon, the sun is probably shining all over continental europe, and you’re all probably off away from your desks for a weekend in the country or on the beach. So why spoil the fun. I’ll save my piece on Portugal till Monday. And meantime, you deserve something better than ‘gloomy [...]

Looking forwards rather than backwards, I can’t help trying to imagine what the world will look like on Monday. (We may all be in for a surprise, but the latest poll seems to put the ‘no’ at 55%, which is quite a large margin of error if it’s wrong, *and* Le Monde today makes the [...]

Conventional marxist theory used to argue that capitalism was doomed to regular and deepening crisis due to the impact of a phenomen known as ‘the falling rate of profit’. Basically the idea runs as follows: since on the marxist view labour is the only source of genuine wealth creation, and capital accumulation means that the [...]

The latest data on French household spending show that it rose rather faster than expected in April. This suggests that consumer spending is still supporting economic growth in sharp contrast with the pattern in Germany. In Germany the domestic economy actually *contracted* in the first quarter. True the German economy grew, but this was [...]

Michael Mandel had an interesting take on the US trade deficit in Business Week earlier this month (btw: he also has a weblog).
His opinion is that the US trade deficit isn’t as big a deal as people often think. One of the reasons: that the ongoing import of human capital into the US (which of [...]

Provisional GDP numbers for eurozone countries in the first quarter are out today. The German economy surprisingly bounces back, whilst Italy is now officially in recession after two quarters of contraction. Also worthy of note is that the Dutch economy contracted slightly in the first quarter, which may have some implications for the forthcoming constitution [...]