Category Archives: Deflation-Inflation-Stagflation
Let Them Eat Credit
By most counts, the U.S. economy started growing in the middle of last year. For many Americans, though, it does not feel as if the Great Recession has ended—unemployment and underemployment are still alarmingly high, and job growth is weak. … Continue reading
Collapse?
Taleb Says Government Bonds to Collapse, Avoid Stocks – Bloomberg Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who warned that unforeseen events can roil markets in “The Black Swan,” said he is “betting on the collapse of government bonds” and that investors should avoid … Continue reading
Deflation worries
Back to Worrying about Worse-Case Scenarios – Tom Petruno, LA Times The fear pushing government bond yields sharply lower isn’t about whether the world is facing just a temporary economic slowdown. Rather, it’s dread of a downturn that would set … Continue reading
A Roller Coaster Ride to Hell
If you’ve been paying attention this past decade, it won’t surprise you to learn that the country’s policy elites are in the midst of a destructive, well-nigh unhinged discussion about the future of the nation. But even by the degraded … Continue reading
Deflation Danger
Imagine a world where prices of all sorts of goods and services just keep moving down. Your weekly grocery bill shrinks. Your hairstylist gladly accepts 15% less, just to get the business. At long last, movie theaters even stop gouging … Continue reading
Bank credit is contracting and getting more expensive
AMERICA’S GDP is growing, employment is finally expanding and the stockmarket is buoyant. Yet one thing has not changed: the Federal Reserve’s monetary pedal remains firmly pressed to the floor. For more than a year it has kept its short-term … Continue reading
Washington Possessed
My Nov. 10, 2008 column warned that big government was walking away as the knockout winner over the private sector in the financial crisis. But it’s going much further than I’d feared. The federal government has accelerated its takeover of … Continue reading
Deflation – then Inflation – and then a decade of Stagflation
The real economy is still deflating. Just look at the jobs situation. Far from slowing or stabilizing, 2009 was the worst year yet for job losses – ’07…’08 …and ’09…each year has produced greater losses. Even James Grant, who predicted … Continue reading
Sic transit America?
Flagging: a US sailor stands on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS George Washington If a week is a long time in politics, a decade is starting to look like an age in geopolitics. Comparing the America that … Continue reading
2010 Warning
Bill Bonner writes at The Daily Reckoning: The stock market has not been corrected. It could easily get cut in half in the next six months. (We’re leaving our ‘Crash Alert’ flying over the building with the gold balls…until stocks … Continue reading
Obama’s Big Sellout
Barack Obama ran for president as a man of the people, standing up to Wall Street as the global economy melted down in that fateful fall of 2008. He pushed a tax plan to soak the rich, ripped NAFTA for … Continue reading
Deacons, Secularism, and the Welfare State
A few weeks ago Hunter Baker posted some thoughts on secularism and poverty, in which he wrote of the common notion that since private charity, particularly church-based care, had failed to end poverty, it seems only prudent to let the … Continue reading
The Big Government Boss isn’t going away
“Hindsight is a wonderful thing,” said Timothy W. Long, the chief bank examiner for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. “At the height of the economic boom, to take an aggressive supervisory approach and tell people to stop … Continue reading
Public Trust has Economic Consequences
Public trust has economic consequences, by Howard Davies, Commentary, Project Syndicate: Public trust in financial institutions, and in the authorities that are supposed to regulate them, was an early casualty of the financial crisis. That is hardly surprising, as previously … Continue reading
Rushing to the Exits?
Bottom Line. The Fed is moving toward the exit as they look toward the conclusion of their securities purchases programs. But it is not clear that such a move is justified by their own forecasts or the inflation/wage/employment data. There … Continue reading
Genie needed: The magic of getting liquidity back into the bottle!
Prof. Jim Hamilton at Econbrowser (thanks Mark Thoma for the link) addresses one of the Fed’s standard methods of draining liquidity from the banking system: reverse repurchase agreements. Basically, the Fed will transfer some of its assets to the banking … Continue reading
Unemployment numbers still point to partial recovery
Conclusion: the labor market is till weak, weaker than it should be at this point in a cyclical recovery. Unless this changes in the fall and winter, a double dip recession is going to be more likely. While the preceding … Continue reading
It’s Unemployment, Stupid!
Pittsburgh protesters demand G20 do more for jobs Forbes “We’re not going to accept a jobless recovery,” said Larry Adams, a postal worker who came from Jersey City, New Jersey, for the protest. …
Inflation and the Fall of the Roman Empire by Joseph R. Peden
By the time of Trajan in 117 AD, the denarius was only about 85 percent silver, down from Augustus’s 95 percent. By the age of Marcus Aurelius, in 180, it was down to about 75 percent silver. In Septimius’s time … Continue reading
Is Treasury Courting Inflation?
Geithner recently told the Chinese: NO, don’t worry, watch what we do. *********************** Deborah Solomon and Jon Hilsenrath at the WSJ inform us that, in order to keep from hitting the $12.1 billion trillion debt ceiling, the Treasury Department is … Continue reading
Stock Market when EPS Growth Turns Positive
When the market is overvalued, as it is now, rising interest rates can have a much more severe impact as the market quickly eliminates its’ overvaluation as it did in 1961 and 1987. The current rally is being driven by … Continue reading
The ECB and Inflation
The Importance of ECB Wording on Inflation – Euro Thoughts Sep 7-11 2009 – UniCredit Group PrintShare Delicious Digg Facebook reddit Technorati Aurelio Maccario | Sep 9, 2009 Last Thursday my boss, Marco Annunziata, did not hesitate to define President … Continue reading
Just so you know
Announced changes in the regulatory landscape, including for hedge funds, private equity, and derivatives and securitization markets, will contribute to an increase in overall credit costs. The secular trend towards lower nominal interest rates, which has sustained financial intermediation and … Continue reading
Looking For An Exit
Let’s see if we can start by agreeing on some basic facts. First, the process of securitization was unquestionably enormously successful in the early part of this decade in attracting huge sums of capital from all around the world to … Continue reading
The Committee to Defraud the World
To say now that ‘No one knew’ or ‘I was mistaken’ or ‘I was just doing as I was told’ is another in a series of lies and deceptions that have supported one of the greatest frauds in the history … Continue reading →