Tag Archives: Central Banks

Economic Nirvana “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon,” economist and Nobel Prize recipient Milton Friedman once remarked.  He likely meant that inflation is the more rapid increase in the supply of money relative to the output of goods and services which money is traded for. Photo via mises.ca - Click to enlarge Famous Monetarist School representative Milton Friedman thought the US should adopt...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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”...

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...