Marshall Auerback has 27 years experience in the investment management business, serving as a global portfolio strategist for RAB Capital Plc, a UK-based fund management group with $2bn under management since 2003 and co-manager of the RAB Gold Fund. He also serves as an economic consultant to PIMCO, the world’s largest bond fund management group, and a non-executive director of Pinetree Capital in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. From 1983-1987, he was an investment manager at GT Management (Asia) Limited in Hong Kong, where he focussed on the markets of Hong Kong, the ASEAN countries (Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand), New Zealand and Australia. From 1988-91, Mr Auerback was based in Tokyo, where his Pacific Rim expertise was broadened to include the Japanese stock market. From 1992-95, Mr Auerback worked in New York for the Tiedemann Investment group, where he ran an emerging markets’ hedge fund. From 1996-99, he worked as an international economics strategist for Veneroso Associates, which provided macroeconomic strategy to a number of leading institutional investors. From 1999-2002, he managed the Prudent Global Fixed Income Fund for David W. Tice & Associates, a USVI-based investment management firm, and assisted with the management of the Prudent Bear Fund. Mr Auerback graduated magna cum laude in English & Philosophy from Queen’s University in 1981 and received a law degree from Corpus Christi College, Oxford University in 1983.

Blog Entries by Marshall Auerback

Time to Try Government as Employer of Last Resort

7 Comments | Posted November 17, 2009 | 10:40 AM (EST)


As part of the Roosevelt Institute's 10-part series on the Jobs Crisis, running on the New Deal 2.0 blog from Nov. 12-25, I was asked to reflect on what can be done to get Americans working again. Here's my take.

At 10.2%, unemployment is now at its highest level...

Read Post

Happy Halloween: Pay Curbs are a Trick on the Taxpayer, Not a Treat

1 Comments | Posted October 27, 2009 | 04:30 PM (EST)


How appropriate that with Halloween just around the corner, the Fed and Treasury have announced a coordinated effort that will put the central bank at the forefront of pay regulation on the zombie firms now kept alive courtesy of US government largesse. Trick or treat...

Read Post

Claims of Financial Reform Victory? You Can't Reform Vampires and Zombies

18 Comments | Posted October 17, 2009 | 01:01 PM (EST)


If nothing else, the Obama Administration has learned the virtues of Clintonian spin. The so-called "financial reform victory" claimed Friday over approved new rules for over-the-counter derivatives is, in reality, akin to using a band-aid to treat gangrene.

Any kind of bill which (in...

Read Post

The US Dollar: Don't Just Do Something, Stand There!

Posted October 15, 2009 | 01:10 PM (EST)



It seems there isn't a day that goes by without more commentary on the demise of the dollar and the concomitant risk of a collapse of the world's reserve currency. Again, the reasoning here appears largely to be based on the tyranny of orthodox neo-liberal...

Read Post

The G20 Summit: Hijacked by Neo-Liberalism

Posted September 29, 2009 | 03:23 PM (EST)


We've said it before and we'll say it again. As a matter of national accounting, the domestic private sector cannot increase savings unless and until foreign or government sectors increase deficits. Call this the tyranny of double entry bookkeeping: the government's deficit equals by identity the non-government's surplus.

So, if...

Read Post

FDIC Shortfall Symptom of Much Bigger Problem

1 Comments | Posted September 25, 2009 | 04:45 PM (EST)


So it has come to this. According to the NY Times, regulators are "seriously considering a plan to have the nation's healthy banks lend billions of dollars to rescue the insurance fund that protects bank depositors. That would enable the fund, which is rapidly running out of money because...

Read Post

Obama's Financial Reform Speech Fizzles

4 Comments | Posted September 17, 2009 | 04:32 PM (EST)


The President has marked the anniversary of the demise of Lehman Brothers with a new speech designed to breathe new life into his financial reform proposals. But the Obama administration already forfeited its best chance to reform the banking system when the crisis was at its height.

For all of...

Read Post

Why Government Spending Is the Solution, Not the Problem

6 Comments | Posted September 15, 2009 | 04:31 PM (EST)


Hundreds of thousands of people marched to the U.S. Capitol on Sunday, carrying signs with slogans such as "Obamacare makes me sick" as they protested the president's health care plan and our so-called "out-of-control spending." The marchers were chanting "enough, enough" and "We the People." Others, channeling their inner Joe...

Read Post

Obama's Health Care Speech: Soaring Rhetoric, Scant Imagination

57 Comments | Posted September 10, 2009 | 07:43 PM (EST)


A history of failed attempts to introduce universal health insurance has left us with a system in which the government pays directly or indirectly for more than half of the nation's health care, but the actual delivery both of insurance and of care is undertaken by a crazy quilt of...

Read Post

Putting the 'Change' Back in "Change You Can Believe In": The Two Faces of Barack Obama

57 Comments | Posted September 3, 2009 | 08:17 PM (EST)


So now it appears to be official: Obama does plan to drop the public insurance option. The "change you can believe in" President is metamorphosing before our eyes into the champion of the status quo. As if to add insult to injury, we have this gem yesterday, from Politico.com:

...
Read Post

We Already Have a "Public Option" -- It's Called Medicare

15 Comments | Posted August 25, 2009 | 06:06 PM (EST)


Senator Charles Schumer indicated earlier this week that Democrats were fleshing out plans to pass health legislation, particularly the option of a new government-run insurance program, with a simple majority, instead of the 60 votes that would ordinarily be needed to overcome a filibuster. Typically for the party...

Read Post

Is Obama the Change President -- or the Republicans' Best Manchurian Candidate?

Posted August 18, 2009 | 12:36 PM (EST)


No more free passes. A number of the President's supporters who expressed concerns about the pro-Wall Street tilt of his early administration decisions were prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt so long as he came through on healthcare. Obama's statement over the weekend that the public option...

Read Post

Debtor's Revolt?

6 Comments | Posted August 12, 2009 | 03:02 PM (EST)


Once all the TARPs are tidied up and the quarterly profits no longer a revelation, American consumers will still be swaddled in debt. What's to stop them from just walking away from it -- and who's to say, if the banks keep this kind of behavior up, we don't want...

Read Post

Why Goldman Still Owes Us

11 Comments | Posted July 27, 2009 | 02:49 PM (EST)


Goldman has given some cash back, but it's chump change for a company that's benefited from close ties to the Fed for more than 15 years, Marshall Auerback argues at NewDeal2.0

Give Lloyd Blankfein some credit. After weeks of being raked over the coals, Goldman Sachs became the first...

Read Post

Big Banks to American Public: "Screw You"

5 Comments | Posted July 21, 2009 | 01:37 PM (EST)


Roosevelt Institute Braintruster Marshall Auerback wonders why bailed-out banks are getting giddy with dangerous speculation and sky-high bonuses when the rest of us are still dealing with financial chaos. Has the American public had enough?

Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Citigroup Inc., the three biggest U.S....

Read Post

California Currency? A Taste of Things to Come Unless Percora II Helps Us Leave Discredited Economic Dogma Behind

1 Comments | Posted July 13, 2009 | 05:50 PM (EST)


As California's IOUs signal desperation, Roosevelt Braintruster Marshall Auerback suggests that a Pecora-style Commission could help the public recognize the folly of past economic dogmas that led us into this mess.

At first glance, there would appear to be little connection between California's mounting fiscal crisis and the renewed calls...

Read Post

In This Crisis, Government Spending Isn't Likely to Do Us in -- But Private Savings Might.

8 Comments | Posted July 2, 2009 | 06:05 PM (EST)


Over the past few months, the dollar index has declined some 10 percent amidst repeated calls by leading creditor nations such as China for a new global currency. This has been a recurrent feature of Chinese-American financial diplomacy for several months now, as Beijing frets that their substantial dollar hordes...

Read Post

Risk of Major Social Upheaval Likely if Bank Bonanza Continues

208 Comments | Posted June 25, 2009 | 05:05 PM (EST)


State and local governments have been forced into draconian budget cuts, firing workers who are among the most reliable in making their mortgage payments -- when they have jobs: firemen, policemen, teachers, civil servants.

Yet the Obama administration won't spend even a small fraction of what it has wasted on...

Read Post