Ideas and analysis on money, markets and the world around us.
Even before the Federal Reserve announced its latest bond-buying blitz on September 13, US money supply measures were growing at a healthy clip. Unofficial M3 calculations reached $14.7 trillion in August. Now that the…
Read the articleSome of the dust from Ben Bernanke’s “QE3” announcement on 13 September has settled. The Federal Reserve is now committed to spending $40 billion a month on agency mortgage-backed securities – an open-ended plan. It is…
Read the articleWhen considering whether gold is a value investment, one needs to first recognise that gold does not have a balance sheet, management team, price-earnings ratio or any of the other things one needs to analyse before…
Read the articleHere's everything worth knowing about the euro in one big infographic: The (Solar) Systemic Eurosystem. Click image to enlarge and/or use Ctrl+Plus (or ⌘+Plus for Macs): Hat tip to ECB (many sources).
Read the articleThe BBC is running a three-part series on notable economists, starting with Keynes. There were a number of errors made, but I shall ignore those and address two Keynesian fallacies. The first was that Keynes correctly…
Read the articleThe US Republican Party recently announced its intention to set up a "gold commission", to examine the feasability or not of returning to a gold standard. This raises important questions, cutting across the neoclassical…
Read the articleThe gold standard is slowly becoming a mainstream discussion point again. This is in part thanks to recent calls from US Republicans for another congressional “gold commission” to examine the idea of restoring some form…
Read the articleMy father, who at one time was an education minister in the Kenyan government, used to tell a story of a long-forgotten crisis when the leaders in the educational establishment could only turn to him and ask: ”minister,…
Read the articleTwo Bloomberg correspondents reported on August 8 that the US Government’s unfunded liabilities rose by $11 trillion last year, “ten times larger than the official deficit”, and are now at an estimated $222 trillion.…
Read the articleDespite the pause in monetary stimulus and the huge expectations built up over QE3, the truth is that US money supply continues to grow at a healthy pace, proving that the supposedly “sterilised” Operation Twist is…
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