Hedging PIIGS Risk with ETFs

My main focus on the Greek crisis is how it will impact the global economy, and especially the United States, but nobody covering this issue can avoid the morality lessons.  First, Greece borrowed too much.  That’s bad.  Second, Greece cooked its books to conceal the magnitude of its deficit spending.  That, too, is bad.  Third, other European countries knew that Greece was doing this, but ignored it so as not to embarrass them or weaken the European Monetary Union.  That may have been the worst error of them all.

By lambert strether of Corrente.

By C.P. Chandrasekhar, Professor of Economics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and Jayati Ghosh, Professor of Economics and Chairperson at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Cross posted from Triple Crisis In the desperate search for evidence that the global recession has bottomed out and the recovery has arrived, the story told by the long-term trend in unemployment levels and rates is being missed.

By Romano Bastianpillai:Economists refer to the debt-burdened European nations collectively as PIIGS. PIIGS is an acronym:P: PortugalI: IrelandI: ItalyG: GreeceS: Spain Why PIIGS?

Article written by Prieur du Plessis, editor of the Investment Postcards from Cape Town blog.This post is a guest contribution by Asha Bangalore, vice president and economist at The Northern Trust  Company.

Michael Johnston submits:While reports of jobless rates in the U.S. or the pace of inflation in China occasionally pop to the top of the headlines, the last several months have seen the spotlight focused on European markets as the continent continues to battle a debt crisis that has threatened to derail a fragile economic recovery. While the fiscal woes have been felt throughout Europe, the impact has not been felt evenly.

CHRISTINE LAGARDE is continuing her charm offensive to win support from the major emerging-market economies for her candidacy to lead the IMF. After meeting the Indian prime minister and finance minister in New Delhi on Tuesday, she has spent Wednesday in Beijing. But the governments of the so-called BRIC countries have refused to endorse Ms Lagarde, in protest over the unwritten convention that a European leads the IMF. Yet no BRIC government has backed Ms Lagarde’s emerging-market rival, Agustin Carstens, the governor of Mexico's central bank, either.   

Cliff Wachtel submits: Asian stock markets closed mostly higher, and thus far today European indices are printing unanimously and appropriately in the green in the opening hours, as are commodities and risk currencies ( by ‘risk’ currency forex, traders refer to a currency that usually rises with stocks and other risk assets, the label has no connection to their stability). The optimism is dangerously premature, primarily because the EU i