Tag Archives: Money Supply

The Anti-Concepts of Money The cash-value of promoting each of these anti-concepts is that they lead people to think that the central bank should impose a monetary policy. To make our lives better.  Our monetary policy is set by the Federal Reserve, which states that in pursuit of its mandate for price stability, it will engineer chronic 2% annual inflation. If we had nuclear reactor policy like this, power plant engineers would seek a slow, steady increase in core...

Basic intuition says this is a no-brainer. Producer prices rise, businesses then pass along these higher input costs to their customers in the form of consumer price “inflation” so as to preserve profits. This is the supply chain hypothesis. Statistically, we’d therefore expect the PPI to lead the CPI. And this was expected for much of Economics’ history, taken for granted as one of those self-evident truths (kind of like the Inflation Fairy). After the dreadful...

It was one of those signals which mattered more than the seemingly trivial details surrounding the affair. The name MF Global doesn’t mean very much these days, but for a time in late 2011 it came to represent outright fear. Some were even declaring it the next “Lehman.” While the “bank” did eventually fail, and the implications of it came to be systemic, those overly melodramatic descriptions actually served to downplay the event in public imagination. The world...

As my esteemed podcast co-host Emil Kalinowski has already mentioned (recurrently), we have, this year, two major anniversaries during these dog days of summer circled on our calendar. Today is, obviously, August 9 and for anyone the slightest familiar with the eurodollar story, that date is seared into their consciousness for as long as it will take to rebuild from the ashes created by the monetary fire lit that day. It has been, sadly, fourteen long years and only...

Global confirmed coronavirus cases surpassed 100 million this week. There is no denying that the coronavirus pandemic has caused tremendous hardship and loss. To mitigate new cases climbing further, stricter lockdown and travel restrictions are being announced and implemented, with the curfew in the Netherlands as an example. Lock-down fatigue, as evidenced by the riots against this implemented curfew, is growing. Through it all, hope is on the horizon as vaccine...

It was for a time a somewhat curious dilemma. When it rains it pours, they always say, and for China toward the end of 2015 it was a real cloudburst. The Chinese economy was slowing, dangerous deflation developing around an economy captured by an unseen anchor intent on causing havoc and destruction. At the same time, consumer prices were jumping where they could do the most harm. The Chinese had a pork problem in...

ifo Schnelldienst 16/2018, August 23, 2018. PDF.

ifo Schnelldienst 16/2018, August 23, 2018. PDF.

See the introduction and the video for the terms gold basis, co-basis, backwardation and contango. Before it collapsed, the city of Rome had a population greater than 1,000,000 people. That was an extraordinary accomplishment in the ancient world, made possible by many innovative technologies and the organization of the greatest civilization that the world had ever seen. Such an incredible urban population depended on...

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...