One should learn from one`s mistakes, but Americans apparently do not. The great crisis of 2008 was brought on by the securitization of sub-prime housing mortgages. To a lesser degree the same mistake was made again with the securitization of sub-prime auto loans, and now the housing market is once more preparing the basis for another crisis.
"The purpose of SFI was to build up finance expertise in Switzerland. The approach was to boost the strength of the Swiss banking and finance academia. Since 2006 SFI has built up one of the largest and most successful finance faculties worldwide. "
Donald Trump aims to overhaul the financial services system’s regulation in order to simplify lending process for banks. In your opinion, is this intention reasonable? Why?
That is obviously not a simple question to answer for the reason that a reform of the financial regulatory system in terms of changing the Dodd-Frank needs to be done, but I do not think an overhaul is indeed necessary. What needs to happen is the implementation of some sort of regulations for small to mid-size banks, while regulations for large banks make sense for the most part. A few larger banks here and there need to be reviewed, but the simple fact is that by requiring significantly greater capital, the system is much more stable than it had been and it has been able to withstand the shock and not get into the kind of problems it faced ten years ago. When we talk about reforming the regulatory system, it needs to be done with an eye towards small and mid-size banks, not large banks. Unfortunately, the focus of attention is on larger banks, because they have more money in the government.
Long-term planning is typically Chinese, and the great increase in indebtedness in China is not an accident. Western commentators are quite right to note that debt has recently increased tremendously in the land under Beijing`s control, but they seem to be missing the point. The PBoC wants the renminbi to become the leading global currency, and this plan must obviously have been approved by the all-mighty Party.
Bitcoin prices skyrocketed last week and surged to all-time highs above $2.700, and this generated on the web a lot of articles about a possible bubble of this complex and strange asset.
Like all the financial assets, also Bitcoin can be studied in Technical Analysis using charts. One of the most common errors I have noticed, is the lack of a proper representation of this asset on the graphs.
In the chart below, you can see the BITCOIN/US DOLLAR FX SPOT RATE chart from 2011. It looks impressive but also misleading.
The ECB kept its monetary policy unchanged. Though, strong economic recovery may encourage policymakers to start tightening monetary conditions. Do you share this point of view?
At this point, we agree that the Euro zone’s economy is strengthening. We have recently revised our forecast for this year, though I think the key point here is that the ECB has not really seen any reasonable signs of an economic recovery. We have seen a little bit stronger inflation earlier in the year due to energy effects; however, inflation is probably going to be lower this year than we thought six months ago. Even if the Euro zone economy is picking up steam, we certainly do not expect the ECB to start raising interest rates until 2019.
The current so-called recovery is in its 95th month and is the second-longest one on record, the longest being 118 months. The present S&P P/E ratio is very high and makes one think of 1929 and 2000.
After everything got digitalized, from movies to music, there seems to be a new interest in physical products. Vinyls are making a comeback, while at the same time streaming services like Spotify allow users to listen to music they do not even need to download.
Startup Qleek positions itself right inbetween these two worlds. Their products are called Qleeks, small hexagons that are linked to a specific playlist on a streaming service. They can be played on a special player or just by taking a shot of their QR code. For anyone who made a mixed tape in the 80s or 90s, the allure is easy to see.
