It looks like BoJ Governor, Haruhiko Kuroda’s, minions are getting out and about to brief the financial news services that the biggest stimulator of all the central banks might reduce stimulus earlier than expected. The recipient of the unofficial briefings by BoJ officials is Reuters, which has this to say. The Bank of Japan is dropping subtle, yet intentional, hints that it could edge away from crisis-mode stimulus earlier than expected, through a future hike in its yield target,...
Read More »Business Cycles and Inflation, Part II
Early Warning Signals in a Fragile System [ed note: here is Part 1; if you have missed it, best go there and start reading from the beginning] We recently received the following charts via email with a query whether they should worry stock market investors. They show two short term interest rates, namely the 2-year t-note yield and 3 month t-bill discount rate. Evidently the moves in short term rates over the past ~18...
Read More »SNB: It’s A Bonfire Of The Absurdities
Authored by John Mauldin via MauldinEconomics.com, “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.” – Ecclesiastes 1:2, King James Version (attributed to King Solomon in his old age) This week’s letter will take a look at the growing number of ridiculous, inane, and otherwise nonsensical absurdities that fill the daily economic headlines. I have gone from the occasional smile to scratching my...
Read More »SNB: It’s A Bonfire Of The Absurdities
Authored by John Mauldin via MauldinEconomics.com, “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.” – Ecclesiastes 1:2, King James Version (attributed to King Solomon in his old age) This week’s letter will take a look at the growing number of ridiculous, inane, and otherwise nonsensical absurdities that fill the daily economic headlines. I have gone from the occasional smile to scratching my...
Read More »Deepening Crisis In Hyper-inflationary Venezuela and Zimbabwe Show Why Physical Gold Is Ultimate Protection
Deepening Crisis In Hyper-inflationary Venezuela and Zimbabwe – Real inflation in Zimbabwe is 313 percent annually and 112 percent on a monthly basis – Venezuela’s new 100,000-bolivar note is worth less oday thehan USD 2.50 – Maduro announces plans to eliminate all physical cash – Gold rises in response to ongoing crises One Hundred Trillion Dollars Zimbabwe - Click to enlarge A military coup-de-grace in Zimbabwe...
Read More »Business Cycles and Inflation – Part I
Incrementum Advisory Board Meeting Q4 2017 – Special Guest Ben Hunt, Author and Editor of Epsilon Theory The quarterly meeting of the Incrementum Fund’s Advisory Board took place on October 10 and we had the great pleasure to be joined by special guest Ben Hunt this time, who is probably known to many of our readers as the main author and editor of Epsilon Theory. He is also chief risk officer at investment management...
Read More »Heat Death of the Economic Universe
Big Crunch or Big Chill Physicists say that the universe is expanding. However, they hotly debate (OK, pun intended as a foreshadowing device) if the rate of expansion is sufficient to overcome gravity—called escape velocity. It may seem like an arcane topic, but the consequences are dire either way. If the rate of expansion is too low, then it will get slower and slower until expansion stops entirely, then finally,...
Read More »The Swiss National Bank Now Owns A Record $88 Billion In US Stocks
In the third quarter of 2017, one in which the global economy was supposedly undergoing an unprecedented “coordinated growth spurt”, and in which central banks were preparing to unveil their QE tapering intentions, in the case of the ECB, or raising rates outright, at the Fed, what was really taking place was another central bank buying spree meant to boost confidence that things are now back to normal, using “money”...
Read More »Key Charts: Gold is Cheap and US Recession May Be Closer Than Think
by Dominic Frisby of Money Week Every year, Ronald-Peter Stoeferle and Mark J Valek of investment and asset management company Incrementum put together the report In Gold We Trust – 160-plus pages of charts and thoughts, mostly gold-related, on the state of the world’s finances. There’s so much to look at and consider. It’s a sort of digital equivalent of a coffee-table book. Yesterday I got an email from them, containing a “best of” – a compendium of some of the best...
Read More »Central banks and a sustainable recovery
Published: Friday October 20 2017Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England between 2003 and 2013, discusses monetary policy since the financial crisis and what comes next with Cesar Perez Ruiz, Chief Investment Officer of Pictet Wealth Management.You once said that central banks need to be ‘as boring as possible’. Is that still the case today?Central banks should respond to developments in the economy as predictably as possible, so the news should not be about debates within a policy...
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