Tag Archive: central-banks

A Darwin Award for Capital Allocation

2016-06-10

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2016-06-10

  Beyond Human Capacity Distilling down and projecting out the economy’s limitless spectrum of interrelationships is near impossible to do with any regular accuracy.  The inputs are too vast.  The relationships are too erratic.   The economy – comple...

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Janet Yellen – Backtracking Again

2016-06-08

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2016-06-08

  Muhammad Ali Could Take a Punch BALTIMORE – You had to admit. Muhammad Ali could take a punch. Unlike Donald Trump, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, he was a real war hero. He stood up and faced his enemies on the draft board, rather ...

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Turning Stones Into Bread – The Japanese Miracle

2016-06-03

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2016-06-03

  Stuffing the Futon Our friend Ramsey Su just asked what Haruhiko Kuroda and Shinzo Abe are going to do now in light of the strong yen (aside from perhaps doing the honorable thing). Isn’t it time to just “wipe out some debt with the stroke of a pen...

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Guided By Nonsense

2016-06-03

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2016-06-03

  Seven Year Achievement   “Read the directions and directly you will be directed in the right direction.” — Lewis Carroll   See? It’s easy Janet! Just read the directions! Illustration credit: Walt Disney   U.S. consumers are at it again.  After a s...

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Notes from ECB Press Conference

2016-06-02

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2016-06-02

ECB press conference June 2 2016 Q; Risk to inflation balanced? April meeting, no conclusive evidence of second round effects, are they now? A; Additional stimulus beyond CSPP and TLTRO2 not necessary as we expect higher inflation. We do not see evid...

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On the Road to Panicville

2016-05-31

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2016-05-31

  An Alert for the Global Posse of Liquidity Junkies In the summer of 2015 and again in December-February this year, global stock markets were rattled by weakness in the yuan’s exchange rate vs. the US dollar. Yuan weakness is widely held to exacerba...

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Nigeria Currency Devaluation Looms As FX Forwards Crash To Record Lows

2016-05-25

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2016-05-25

Despite US equity investors' exuberance over bouncing crude oil prices, the world's crude producers continue to suffer and while Venezuela is in the headlines every day (having already collapsed into chaos), Nigeria appears the nearest to that abyss ...

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Academic Skulduggery – How Ivory Tower Hubris Wrecks your Life

2016-05-23

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2016-05-23

In the 1970s economists started to incorporate rational expectations into their models and not long after the seminal Kydand & Prescott (1977) article named Rules Rather than Discretion: The Inconsistency of Optimal Plan was published. Their work has...

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The Japanese Popsicle Affair

2016-05-20

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2016-05-20

  Policy-Induced Contrition in Japan As we keep saying, there really is no point in trying to make people richer by making them poorer – which is what Shinzo Abe and Haruhiko Kuroda have been trying to do for the past several years. Not surprisingly,...

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Fed Suppression, Long Term Economic Repression

2016-05-19

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2016-05-19

The Federal Reserve really wants to raise rates, but they do not dare as the consequence of interrupting an unprecedented level of capital misallocation is too grave to face head on. So our money masters continue their low interest rate policy; pulli...

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Kuroda-San in the Mouth of Madness

2016-05-14

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2016-05-14

  Deluded Central Planners Zerohedge recently reported on an interview given by Lithuanian ECB council member Vitas Vasiliauskas, which demonstrates how utterly deluded the central planners in the so-called “capitalist” economies of the West have bec...

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With Fiat Money, Everything Is Relative

2016-04-30

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2016-04-30

  What Determines a Currency’s Value? At the end of March the price of the euro in terms of US dollars closed at 1.1378. This was an increase of 4.7 percent from February when it increased by 0.3 percent. The yearly growth rate of the price of the eu...

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FX Daily April 28: What is the Next Shoe to Drop?

2016-04-28

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2016-04-28

One can appreciate the frustration in Tokyo. The Bank of Japan surprised the world by adopting negative rates in January and the yen rallied. Today it disappointed many by not easing, and the yen rallied. The BOJ next meetings in mid-June and like this week, the outcome of its meeting will be announced the day … Continue reading »

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A Fatal Flaw in the System

2016-04-11

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2016-04-11

  The Hard Rocks of Real Life BALTIMORE – The Dow dropped 174 points on Thursday, the biggest fall in six weeks. Not the end of the world. Maybe not even the end of this year’s bounce-back bull run. As you’ll recall, stocks sold off at the beginning ...

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Frisky Yen Upsets Japan’s GOSPLAN

2016-04-06

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2016-04-06

  It Wasn’t Supposed to Do That… When you’re a central banker in a pure fiat money system and even your ability to print your own currency into oblivion is questioned by the markets, you really have a problem. This is actually funny on quite a number...

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Rotten to the Core

2016-04-06

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2016-04-06

  Poison Money BALTIMORE – We live in a world of sin and sorrow, infected by a fraudulent democracy, Facebook, and a corrupt money system. Wheezing, weak, and weary from the exertion of trying to appear “normal,” the economy staggers on.   Staggering...

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A Tribute to the Jackass Money System

2016-04-04

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2016-04-04

  A Witless Tool of the Deep State? Finance or politics? We don’t know which is jollier. The Republican presidential primary and Fed monetary policies seem to compete for headlines. Which can be most absurd? Which can be most outrageous? Which can ge...

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Federal Devolution

2016-04-01

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2016-04-01

  Leaning Into the Wind BALTIMORE – During our lifetime, three Fed chiefs have faced a similar challenge. Each occupied the chairman’s seat at a time when “normalization” of interest rates was in order.   Recently, we remembered William McChesney Mar...

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The Pitfalls of Currency Manipulation – A History of Interventionist Failure

2016-03-30

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2016-03-30

  The G-20 and Policy Coordination Readers may recall that the last G20 pow-wow (see “The Gasbag Gabfest” for details) featured an uncharacteristic lack of grandiose announcements, a fact we welcomed with great relief. The previously announced “900 p...

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How Venezuela Exported 12.5 Tonnes Of Gold To Switzerland On March 8

2016-03-19

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2016-03-19

Submitted by Ronan Manly of Bullionstar Blogs Following on from last month in which BullionStar’s Koos Jansen broke the news that Venezuela had sent almost 36 tonnes of its gold reserves to Switzerland at the beginning of the year, “Venezuela Exporte...

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