What Do 'Mama's Boys' Have to Do With the Euro Debt Crisis?

MAKING SEN$E -- February 17, 2012 at 12:15 PM EDT

What Do 'Mama's Boys' Have to Do With the Euro Debt Crisis?

This isn't just a candidate for chart of the day or even chart of the week. Hedge fund manager Boaz Weinstein, founder of Saba Capital and former co-head of credit trading at Deutsche Bank, presented this at a conference on the Eurocrisis, as reported on the Business Insider website.

The chart plots the relationship between the price of default insurance on selected European countries and their degree of male "boomerangness" -- what percentage of male adult children 25-34 live with their parents: the Mama's Boy Index. At one extreme, Finland, where the price of insuring against government bond default is as low as it gets and less than 10 percent of 25-to-34-year-old boys have boomeranged back home; at the other extreme, Greece, with nearly 60 percent of the boys back in the fold and a credit default swap price that translates into a 30 percent chance of default in the next 12 months.

Read more here and watch our piece on Boomerang kids here.

This entry is cross-posted on the Making Sen$e page, where correspondent Paul Solman answers your economic and business questions.

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