Ideas and analysis on money, markets and the world around us.
On Thursday the European Central Bank’s Mario Draghi was moved to defend the euro, after Spain’s government bond yields rose dramatically through the 7% level. And when Valencia asked the central government for a…
Read the articleWithin the eurozone there are great stresses. At one extreme there are punitive costs of borrowing for Greece, Cyprus, Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Italy; at the other there is zero or negative interest rates for…
Read the articleI have recently written about the breakdown of disaggregated data from the futures markets into producers and swap dealers for gold and silver futures, as reported in the Commitment of Traders reports issued by the US…
Read the articleHistory doesn’t repeat but it does rhyme, so the old saying goes. While we can learn many economic lessons from studying the past, countries, institutions and monetary arrangements change, rendering exact comparisons…
Read the articleSometimes bailouts do not achieve what is intended, which is one reason they should be avoided. The people of Iceland apparently have some discerning insight into this basic financial reality. When a financial collapse…
Read the articleThe LIBOR scandal has been hogging headlines of late, with questions raised again about the extent to which big banks are now a law unto themselves; the focus on Barclays obscures the fact that other banks are likely to…
Read the articleThe dream of developing a science that would allow wise philosopher kings to rule humanity from ivory towers is as old as Plato, but it received a significant boost during the 20th Century as “scientific” socialism…
Read the articleEarly in 2011, the London Bullion Market Association began to push for gold to be recognised by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision as the ultimate high-quality liquid asset. It has been a planned approach…
Read the articleI am an avid reader of monetary history. Of late I have been focusing on the monetary events of the 1920s and 1930s. By learning from the maelstrom that riled the global financial scene during those two tumultuous…
Read the articleThe assessment of economic growth based on Gross Domestic Product is a fallacy, because GDP is merely a measure of the amount of money in an economy. The one thing it does not measure, which is central to economic…
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