Ideas and analysis on money, markets and the world around us.
Interventions in markets by governments and central banks are routine and we take them for granted. No one questions them, but they can create dangerous distortions. Their reason for intervening is to take price…
Read the articleIt’s almost as if currencies are designed to confuse you. In fact, sometimes they even lie to you. Take the pound sterling for example; each 5, 10, 20 and 50 pound note assures you, the esteemed owner, the gracious…
Read the articleAs the first “too-big-to-fail” euro-periphery nation to have caught fire, many see Spain as the pivotal battleground that will determine the eurozone's future. Massive money printing by the European Central Bank is the…
Read the articleWe are coming up to the fifth anniversary of the financial crisis, at least for the UK’s banking system, because it was five years ago that anxious depositors were queuing up to withdraw their money from Northern Rock,…
Read the articleLike all things in life, when investing, having a high IQ is largely beneficial. It helps you to source the right information, analyse it and “know what to do”. Quite simple. But there’s a big difference between…
Read the article“The issuer’s promise” is a phrase I have used recently to describe the backing for fiat currencies. The purpose of this article is to define it further, given that it is increasingly likely to be challenged in the…
Read the articleOn 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…
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