Tag Archives: Economics

The Credit Suisse Research Institute published its seventh Emerging Consumer Survey, the annual report on consumer trends in emerging markets. Key themes are e-commerce, aware consumerism, and the growing popularity of domestic brands. The top three of this year's Emerging Consumer Survey are...

The US Federal Reserve raised the policy rate by 25 basis points in mid-March, but left its outlook largely unchanged. We continue to expect two more rate hikes in 2017. After hawkish comments from Federal Reserve (Fed) officials in recent weeks, the 25 basis point hike in the target range for the...

In his blog A Fine Theorem, Kevin Bryan discusses the history of economic thought leading from the classical economists and Walras to Arrow and Debreu. My read of the literature on GE following Arrow is as follows. First, the theory of general equilibrium is an incredible proof that markets can, in theory and in certain cases, work as efficiently as an all-powerful planner. That said, the three other hopes of general equilibrium theory since the days of Walras are, in fact, disproven by...

In separate blog posts, Russ Roberts and John Cochrane have called for humility on the part of economists. Asking “What do economists know?,” Roberts and Cochrane point out—correctly—that economics is not as strong on quantification as some economists and many pseudo economists pretend, and as is often expected from economists. Economics is not the same as applied statistics although the latter can help clarify, at least to some extent, the empirical relevance of economic theories....

There is gold in Asia, at least gold of the intellectual variety for anyone who wishes to see it. The Chinese offer us perhaps the purest view of monetary conditions globally, where RMB money markets are by design tied directly to “dollar” behavior. It is, in my view, enormously helpful to obsess over China’s monetary system so as to be able to infer a great deal about the global monetary system deep down beyond the...

A number of central banks have taken their interest rates into negative territory in the past years. Credit Suisse Research Institute explores the markets where negative interest rates have been introduced and reports on whether they have been successful. In the autumn of 2014, Denmark and Sweden...

By EconMatters In this Video, we discuss the fact that Central Banks have basically morphed into Hedge Funds with similar risky investing strategies, except they buy without any regard to the underlying fundamentals of the assets they are buying. When did the Swiss Citizens say it was the proper role for the Swiss National Bank to be buying US Stocks? How is this stimulating the Swiss Economy? Central Banks have really...

Events of the previous year, such as Brexit or the election of Donald Trump, seem to have marked the end of globalization as we know it. The world development is set to change. Will we observe the rise of multiple regional powers? Credit Suisse Research Institute in their latest report takes a look at the shift towards a multipolar world....

Globalization and digitization make IT systems vulnerable to attack. Investing in security is therefore essential, and hackers can actually help in this regard. Cybersecurity was not an issue in the 1980s, when the internet was still in its infancy. Since then, however, the number and the...

The cruelest part, perhaps, of this economic condition globally is how it plays against type. In all prior cycles, economies of all kinds and orientations all over the globe would go into recession and then bounce right of it once at the bottom. It was often difficult to see the bottom, of course, but once recovery happened there was no arguing against it. Since the Great “Recession”, which was global, no matter what...