Archives
Commodity losses
December 18th, 2015
Markets have been extraordinarily complacent about the bad debts building up in the financial system. In the wake of the Fed’s decision to raise interest rates this week, the effect on debt was barely mentioned in the subsequent analysis ...
The truth about GDP
December 1st, 2015
“I can prove anything by statistics except the truth” – George Canning Canning’s aphorism is as valid today as when he was Britain’s Prime Minister in 1817. Unfortunately, his wisdom is ignored completely by mainstream economists. Nowhere is this ...
Advice to the Prime Minister/President
November 19th, 2015
Your country faces a stagnating economy. Let us assume your Prime Minister (or President if that is who holds the executive power) seeks advice from two imaginary economists. PM: You two economists have different views on what our economic ...
The declining interest rate cap
November 17th, 2015
Believe it or not, one of the topics in economics that confuses macroeconomists is the actual role of interest rates. For the most part they just assume that an interest rate is the cost of money, the price of ...
The end-point in financial credit
November 6th, 2015
Since the 1980s, markets have had to adapt to a world of infinite credit. Of course, this credit has not been available to everyone: it has been principally deployed in favour of governments, financial markets, and big business. It ...
OneMarketData Acquires Tick Data Inc.
November 3rd, 2015
OneMarketData, LLC , the founders of OneTick, a single solution for event stream processing and time series management of historical and real-time tick data, today announced the acquisition of Virginia-based Tick Data Inc., a trusted and leading provider of ...
Fiat money quantity update
October 30th, 2015
After a few months of slower growth, FMQ has picked up again. FMQ is the sum of True Money Supply (as defined by the Austrian School of Economics), plus the banking system’s reserves and other banking-related liabilities on the ...
Silver as money
October 16th, 2015
Gold is money, admittedly not often circulating as such today. Fiat currencies issued by governments have driven gold out of circulation. But where does this leave silver? Money-substitutes, bank notes and bank deposits, were originally backed by physical silver, ...
China and the dollar
October 9th, 2015
With the benefit of hindsight, the two-day devaluation of the yuan in mid-August might have been a masterstroke of strategy. China executed a financial move that appeared to undermine its own position but instead created trouble for the US; ...
NIRP, its likelihood and effect on commodities
October 5th, 2015
In last week’s article I pointed out that negative interest rates should lead to a general shift in consumer preferences from money towards essential goods. Central bankers may wish for this outcome on a controlled basis to allow them ...
