"It also tells us something else: by seeking insurance against a collapse of the euro, the Bundesbank tells us it no longer regards the demise of the euro as a zero-probability event. If the Bundesbank seeks insurance, so should everybody else."
"Hilscher and Wilson reply that they do not claim that ratings have no informational content whatsoever. Having a S&P rating was certainly better than no information at all, stresses Hilscher"
"Just as individual hedge funds tend to do better when they are small, so too, his analysis shows, the industry as a whole performed better when it was a largely unknown $200bn business, rather than the high profile $1.9tn industry it had grown to become, before the financial crisis in 2008 so dramatically exposed some of its shortcomings. The comforting compounded rates of return reported in hedge fund indices give a misleading impression of the actual cash returns achieved by hedge fund investors. Most of the client money that has flowed in since the industry began to be institutionalised has not achieved anything like the returns the long-term headline index figures suggest.
"
" According to Eurostat, Germany's trade surplus with the rest of the EU grew from 46.4 billion euro in 2000 to 126.5 billion in 2007. The evolution of Germany's bilateral trade surpluses with the Mediterranean countries is especially revealing. Between 2000 and 2007, Greece's annual trade deficit with Germany grew from 3 billion euro to 5.5 billion, Italy's doubled, from 9.6 billion to 19.6 billion, Spain's almost tripled, from 11 billion to 27.2 billion, and Portugal's quadrupled, from 1 billion to 4.2 billion. Between 2001 and 2009, moreover, Germany saw its final total consumption fall from 78.5 percent of GDP to 74.5 percent. Its gross savings rate increased from less than 19 percent of GDP to almost 26 percent over the same period."
