Tag Archives: newsletter

Go ahead and become dependent on asset bubbles and the free spending of the top 5%, and optimize your economy to serve this “growth,” but be prepared for the consequences when the costs of this optimization and dependency come due. Here’s the problem with concentrating most of the income and wealth in the top 5%: the whole economy now depends on their spending and “the wealth effect” of bubbles driving that spending. As the charts below show, the top tier of...

According to a new report released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control, the life expectancy at birth in the United States fell to 77.0 iyears n 2020, falling from 2019’s life expectancy of 78.8 years. The report also noted an increase of mortality with age-adjusted mortality in the US rising from 715.2 per 100,000 in 2019 to 836.4 per 100,000 in 2020. Media reporting on the CDC’s report provide a variety of statistics on one-year percentage changes, no doubt...

© David Johnson | Dreamstime.com On 17 December 2021, Switzerland’s Federal Council put forward a plan to tax the liquids used for e-cigarettes, reported RTS. The Federal Council is proposing a tax similar to the tax on tobacco but at a lower rate in line with e-cigarettes’ lower toxicity. The government does not want to discourage tobacco smokers from transitioning to e-cigarettes and proposes a rate 77% lower than the tax on tobacco cigarettes. The aim is to...

This week, the Federal Reserve gave the most dovish “hawkish” statement ever, an apparent aggressive tapering that, in reality, means maintaining very low rates and massive repurchases for longer. Inflation has skyrocketed and aggressive monetary policy is the key factor in understanding it. I already explained it in my article “The Myth of Cost-Push Inflation.” The Federal Reserve has finally recognized this and has made a U-turn in its policy of maintaining...

If there is a better, more fitting way to head into the Christmas holiday in the United States than by digging into the finances and monetary flows of the People’s Bank of China, then I just don’t want to know what it is. Contrary to maybe anyone’s rational first impression that this is somehow insane, there’s much we can tell about the state of the world, the whole world and its “dollars”, right from this one key data source. And the timing is equally as festive;...

With the eurodollar futures curve slightly inverted, the implications of it are somewhat specific to the features of that particular market. And there’s more than enough reason to reasonably suspect this development is more specifically deflationary money than more general economic concerns. What I mean is, those latter have come later (“growth scare”) only long after the world’s real money truly began to dry up. Money then economy. How do we know? For one, sequence...

When the economics profession turns its attention to financial panics and crashes, the first episode mentioned is tulipmania. In fact, tulipmania has become a metaphor in the economics field. Should one look up tulipmania in The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, a discussion of the seventeenth century Dutch speculative mania will not be found. Guillermo Calvo (1987, p. 707), in his contribution to the Palgrave instead defines tulipmania as: “situations in...

Central banks have come to the fore in recent years by printing money to keep economies afloat. Keystone / Lm Otero Every other month, the world’s most influential central bank governors gather in Basel to swap notes, reinforce personal ties and untangle the technical details of keeping money flowing around the world. Since the financial crisis of 2007-2008, central banks have emerged from dull obscurity to print trillions in multiple currencies. The pandemic has...

According to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the hacking and insider trading scheme made a total of $82 million from 2018 through 2020. Keystone / Anonymous The Russian businessman extradited from Switzerland to the United States and four other Russians have been charged with carrying out a $82-million (CHF75 million) insider trading scheme using data stolen during hacks of US computer networks. US federal prosecutors in Boston announcedExternal link on...

My immediate reaction to the National Archives’ very limited release of a few of the CIA’s JFK-assassination records is this: I’m not interested in seeing what they’re releasing. I’m interested in seeing what they’re still hiding.  However, there was at least one document that they recently released that is incriminating. It’s a document that the CIA published on the Sunday morning after the assassination. It is entitled “SUMMARY of Relevant Information on Lee...