by John E. Charalambakis | Oct 1, 2013 | Commentaries
The headlines of this past weekend edition of the European edition of the Wall Street Journal read: “Debt Targets for Greece Questioned”. In the article Klaus Regling, the managing director of the European Stability Mechanism states that the targets for Greek debt...
by John E. Charalambakis | Sep 24, 2013 | Commentaries
It seems that the Latin phrase Crescit Eundo (it grows as it goes) fits well into the Fed’s modus operandi. In its latest attempt to justify the non-tapering, the Fed told us that fears of slowing growth, interest rate rising, and Washington infighting about the...
by John E. Charalambakis | Sep 18, 2013 | Commentaries
Our Federal Reserve Bank, the ECB, and other central banks of developed nations face a paradox: the same institution that is supposed to hold the ultimate reserves of the commercial banks has a duty of lending those reserves to the banks that are in trouble and which...
by John E. Charalambakis | Sep 8, 2013 | Commentaries
One of my favorite songwriters (Rich Mullins) – who died prematurely sixteen years ago – wrote the song “On the road to Damascus”. Let’s recall some of those lyrics: On the road to Damascus I was hung in the ropes of success When you stripped away the mask...
by John E. Charalambakis | Aug 31, 2013 | Commentaries
In 1904 Sir Halford Mackinder published his famous paper The Geographical Pivot of History. The paper served as the cornerstone for the study of geopolitics in the 20th century. Sir Mackinder claimed in that paper that the age of sea power (initiated by Alfred Mahan’s...
by John E. Charalambakis | Aug 24, 2013 | Commentaries
We live in an era of financial repression where savings are penalized due to low interest rates. The latter is the outcome of the financial crisis. This in turn was caused by collateralizing questionable assets, derivatives’ volume explosion, securitizing...