Tag Archives: Bawerk

Ben Bernanke’s creativity inspired a generation of economists and central bankers. QE, ZIRP and NIRP established a new class of economics that is mathematically sound but practically disastrous. Billions of dollars were transferred from savers to investors to boost the economy, but the wizards of quant forgot that something has to give. In this case, it was the formation of a pension crisis that threatens the golden...

It took a while, but the world are slowly coming to grips with the simple fact that the red-suzerains in Beijing are not the infallible leaders en route to a new superior economic model as they thought they were. All the craze that emanated from the spurious work of Joshua Cooper Ramo, which eventually led to works like “How China’s Authoritarian Model Will Dominate the Twenty-First Century,” are slowly catching...

In our latest Toward a New World Order, Part III we ended by promising to look closer at investment implications from the political and economic shift we currently find ourselves in; and that story must begin with the dollar. While known to the investing public for years, the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) recently acknowledge that the real risk-off / risk-on metric in global markets is the dollar and...

A new world order is coming of age and the transition is painful to accept for a Western middle class with a deep-seated sense of entitlement. We showed how the West feels threatened globally in Toward a New World Order and followed up explaining how this translate into domestic politics in Toward a New World Order Part II. We will now continue this series by showing how gross economic mismanagement have created the...

True Political Axis One of the most widespread misconceptions in the realm of politics is the notion of a left-right axis. This has been used over and over to explain political outcomes and paint the various factions as polar opposites. For example, in the US the two main parties, the Republicans (right) and Democrats (left), are often portrayed as a fight between good and evil. Which party representing good and...

Share of World GDP A Brave New World is coming? Perhaps. We had a recent discussion with a group of people in the hopeless business of doing long term forecasting. This made us think about what the world will look like over the next 20 to 40 years. A pretty thankless task, but the bottom line is without a damn good war, Asia will be the way of the future. As an experiment, assume, as most long term forecasters do,...

In the years following the 2008 crash and today, the use of forward guidance from central banking policy makers has become increasingly important. What this nonsense ultimately has translated into is a ridiculous track record in posting upbeat assessments on the economic environment, aimed at trying to fool the marginal investor into believing “there are no need for worry, central bankers have everything under...

Central banks are currently creating the mother of all bubbles. To my view it was caused by masses of cheap labor in China that entered the global economy in the early 1990s.This reduced inflation and interest rates, while Chinese productivity continously improved, in particular when rural workers came into the cities.The mother of all bubbles will pop at the latest, when Chinese wages approach Western levels....

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Laws of politics have been turned upside down. The Intellectuals Yet Idiots can make no sense of it. The underdog who ‘tell it how it is’ appeal to people while established reasoning does not.

[unable to retrieve full-text content]The great “science” of economics once discovered an empirical relationship between GDP and unemployment that has been dubbed Okun’s Law. It simply states that the unemployment rate rises as GDP contracts, or vice versa, as production shrinks less peo...