Recent Posts

If it moves, tax it. That’s desperate, India

Desperation is creeping into India’s economic policy-making. Having lost the fiscal plot, bureaucrats are trying to marshal resources by squeezing taxpayers, foreign investors, firms planning buybacks and even the central bank. Such overreach never ends well. Tax collections last year were a full 1 percentage point of GDP lower than the 7.9 percent the government had hoped to obtain. Rathin ...

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Italy, Austria take bond market to a weird place

For the bond market’s “tale of two cities,” look at Rome and Vienna. Both Italy and Austria have come to the market recently with ultra-long duration debt sales. It’s remarkable that the latter managed to get a 98-year issue away with a 1.17 percent interest rate, but Italy’s 48-year offer this week at a near 3 percent yield is pretty ...

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Trump is defeating his own Nafta replacement

It’s getting harder and harder to imagine the new Nafta successfully ratified during this Congress. And Donald Trump has only himself to blame for that. For one thing, the White House strategy on getting the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement ratified is still incoherent at best. As Bloomberg’s Jenny Leonard reports, there are at least two factions, surrounding Vice President Mike Pence ...

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