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Correspondant à ces filtres : 14 articles
Articles
- ÉclairageEconomic Security
The policy rate has given back less than a fifth of its climb
On annual averages the federal funds rate rose 5.06 percentage points from its 2021 low to its 2024 peak, then fell 0.93. Everything priced against the policy rate is still being priced against most of the increase.
- DécryptageInfrastructure
What a debt service coverage ratio tests
A coverage ratio is one division sum written into a loan agreement, and almost every argument about it is an argument about the definitions on either side of the line. By the end you will know what goes in the numerator, what the denominator fixes, and why a ratio measured in a good year says little about a bad one.
- CommentaireDevelopment Finance
A development institution should give up the senior position and hold the first loss
The United States ran a current account deficit in every year from 2020 to 2025, averaging 147 billion dollars a quarter at the start of that window and 294 at the end, exactly twice as wide. An institution that gives up the senior position will report a smaller book and a worse loss record, and both are the point.
- PerspectiveDevelopment Finance
Financial depth changes what capital costs and not what a country is able to build
The policy rate moved 4.94 points between 2021 and 2023 and the thirty-year mortgage rate moved 3.85 over the same two years, which is what a deep system does. Across the same window manufacturing output stayed below its 2017 base in every reading.
- CommentaireInfrastructure
The permit counts say permitting is not the binding constraint on American delivery
Housing units authorised by permit fell in each of the four years to 2025, from an annual rate of 1734 thousand units to 1431, while spending on manufacturing plant rose from an annual rate of 75 billion dollars in 2020 to 244 in 2024. Neither series records a waiting time, so neither can show a queue; plant spending fell 29 billion in 2025, the year the policy rate came down.
- DécryptageDevelopment Finance
How a sovereign wealth fund differs from a reserve fund
Both are pools of public money held outside the spending accounts, and the names are used interchangeably. By the end of this you will know the three rules that separate them, why a resource levy so often produces one, and why a central bank's reserves are a third thing again.
- CommentaireDevelopment Finance
Adaptation keeps losing to mitigation because an avoided loss is not a cash flow
The ten-year Treasury averaged 0.89 percent in 2020 and 4.29 percent in 2025, and at those rates a dollar of avoided damage arriving in thirty years is worth 76.7 cents and 28.4 cents. Turning that dollar into a cash flow needs a named obligor, and the party that funds a defence is rarely the party whose balance sheet it repairs.
- PerspectiveIndustrial Policy
What an allocator actually learns from four flat years of industrial output
Industrial production has spent five straight readings within 1.2 points of its 2017 base. That flat line is not evidence that nothing is being built. It is evidence that the aggregate cannot answer the question capital is asking.
- CommentaireInfrastructure
The ten-year Treasury has done more to infrastructure than any permit reform
In 2020 a thirty-year asset was discounted against a long rate of 0.89 percent. In 2025 the same asset is discounted against 4.29. No procedural reform on the table is worth as much as that one line, and almost nobody appraising a project talks about it.
- PerspectiveFiscal Policy
Ohio levies a corporate income tax and collected 176 thousand dollars from it
In the FY2025 collections file the corporate income tax runs from 32.9 percent of New Hampshire's state taxes to effectively nothing in Ohio, and four states have no such levy at all. The share is a poor guide to how a state treats capital, and it is used as a good one.
- ÉclairageInfrastructure
The ten-year yield has risen in every year since 2020
Six annual observations, five changes, and not one of them negative. In the year the overnight policy rate fell 0.93 points, the ten-year rose again.
- DécryptageInfrastructure
What a revenue pledge is and what it does not promise
A revenue pledge hands bondholders one named stream of money and shuts them out of everything else. By the end you will know the order the money leaves the account, the covenant that keeps the stream large enough, and the risks the pledge quietly leaves with the public.
- CommentaireMultilateral Institutions
Sovereign restructuring was built for a world where delay cost the creditor nothing
Reprofiling worked because a payment pushed out ten years cost the creditor nothing in real terms, and in 2020 the implied real ten-year yield was minus 0.60 percent. In 2025 it was plus 1.96 percent, so the same extension now costs a real 17.6 percent, and a process whose only enforcement is peer pressure has to arrange that loss.
- CommentaireCapital Markets
A country should build its export credit agency for speed, because it does not set the terms
The base an export credit is priced against moved 3.40 points on the ten-year Treasury between 2020 and 2025, and the policy rate moved 3.34 points from one year to the next. Those are larger than any margin an agency concedes, which leaves the signing date as the one term it owns, and a fast agency is worth having only if it can also refuse quickly.