Peterson Institute publications RSS News Feed Search   Inflation
Should Be Just Around the Corner  by Peter Boone, Effective
Intervention and Simon Johnson, Peterson Institute for
International Economics  Post on the Wall Street Journal's Real
Time Economics November 24, 2008  © Wall Street Journal  Last
week's stock market collapse—and the latest bailout round for
Citigroup yesterday—makes it clear that America's greatest banks
are still in deep trouble. But the news is actually worse and
much more global. The prices of securitized residential and
commercial mortgages reached new all-time lows, and most
commodity prices continued their rout. The same pattern was seen
in European and Asian markets. The default risk priced into
Irish, Greek, and Italian sovereign bonds continued to rise,
raising questions about the viability of the eurozone. There is
an even larger question mark hanging over Switzerland's
financial viability due to its highly leveraged large banks. The
main star performer of last week was gold