Tag Archives: Featured

In the middle of 1919, the United States was beset by a great many imbalances. Having just conducted a wartime economy, almost everything before then had been absorbed by the World War I effort. With fiscal restraint subsumed by national emergency, inflation was the central condition. Given that the Federal Reserve was by then merely a few years old, no one was quite sure what to do about it. Chairman of the Federal...

President Trump hinted at the end of last week that the Administration’s tax proposals would be aired in the next two or three weeks. This seems to be a signal of its inclusion in his address to both houses of Congress on February 28. This is not quite a State of the Union speech, but similar and precisely what Obama did in February 2009. Taxes are complicated. Much of the discussion so far has been on the border...

Summary: Don’t expect a deal between Greece and its official creditors until late spring or early summer. Grexit is still not a particularly likely scenario. It was the European governments not Greece which put other taxpayers’ skin in the game. Freud warned that unresolved psychological conflicts might be repressed but they keep returning. So too with Greece debt problems.  A new crisis is at hand.  Investor...

Submitted by Thorstein Polleit via The Mises Institute, The US is by far the biggest economy in the world. Its financial markets — be it equity, bonds or derivatives markets — are the largest and most liquid. The Greenback is the most important transaction currency. Many currencies in the world — be it the euro, the Chinese renminbi, the British pound or the Swiss franc — have actually been built upon the US dollar. The...

From the official press release by Swiss Statistics: Swiss Consumer Price Index in January 2017: Consumer Prices Remained Unchanged in January 2017 Neuchâtel, 14.02.2017 (FSO) – The Swiss Consumer Price Index (CPI) remained unchanged in January 2017 compared with the previous month at 100.0 points (December 2015=100). Inflation was 0.3% in comparison with the same month in the previous year. These are the findings from...

Summary: The Dollar Index is powering ahead, moving higher for the eighth consecutive session. Over the past 100 sessions, gold and the Dollar Index move in the opposite direction more than 90% of the time. The technical condition of gold is deteriorating. The Dollar Index is extending its advancing streak today into its eighth consecutive session. It is at its best level since just before Trump’s...

It’s your choice, America–you can keep your cartels and the captured government that enables and protects them, or you can fix what’s broken and unaffordable. If there is any goal that might attract support from across the political spectrum, it’s creating more fulltime jobs in the U.S. But this laudable goal is dead-on-arrival (DOA) unless we first fix these four things. Why is job growth stagnating? Many point to...

Swiss Franc EUR/CHF - Euro Swiss Franc, February 13(see more posts on EUR/CHF, ) - Click to enlarge GBP/CHF Pound to Swiss Franc exchange rates provide strong beginning to the week Pound to Swiss Franc exchange rates have enjoyed a strong boost to begin the week, after what had been a disheartening end to the week for many Franc buyers. The Pound has regularly suffered on Friday’s since the Referendum, with...

On Friday, after it emerged that as part of Marine Le Pen’s strategic vision for France, should she win, is a return to the French franc as well as redenomination of some €1.7 billion in French (non-international law) bonds, both rating agencies and economists sounded the alarm, warning it would “amount to the largest sovereign default on record, nearly 10 times larger than the €200bn Greek debt restructuring in 2012,...

My new book,Political Economy of Tomorrowhas just been published, and it is available on Amazon. The book is not so much of a sequel to my first book,Making Sense of the Dollar. There is very little about the foreign exchange market in the new book.  However,  it is not wholly new cloth either.  There is a journalist-cum-presidential adviser at the turn of the 20th century, Charles Conant, that I introduce in the first...