Economy

For months, Ben Bernanke has been more or less pleading with fiscal policymakers to catch up to him. With yesterday’s announced agreement on tax cuts and the extension of unemployment benefits, Congress and the Administration are making the…

This is a very good debate between Garry Shilling, a prominent deflationista, and Peter Schiff, a prominent inflationista, because it shows you the core substance of the arguments on the inflation-deflation debate. I am calling this one for…

US employment data is wholly disappointing. Job creation much less than expected, unemployment rate jumps, hourly earnings flat and work week flat. The back month revisions pale in comparison to the disappointment. The market expected a…

Ever since the U.S. financial crisis in 2008 there have been many comparisons to Japan and their "lost decade." Most comparisons mark the start of each financial crisis as the end of 1989 for Japan and 2007 for the U.S. We believe each…

Global Economic Intersection announced Monday that its economic indicator (EEI) had slipped slightly into negative territory for the first time since February 2010. Some other economic indicators have shown improvement over their levels…

The November US jobs report is slated for release tomorrow and there does not seem to be any reason not to look for a relatively robust report. The usual reports have been uniformly constructive. This includes, the ADP report, the weekly…

The number of US workers filing new applications for unemployment benefits rose 26,000 from last week's outlier 407,000 number. Last week's number was also revised higher to 410,000. Nevertheless, the trend in jobless claims is still down,…

Walter Bagehot wrote an eponymous financial book in the 19th century called Lombard Street, giving advice on finance and banking. The most important and quoted piece of advice Bagehot gave was to the Central Bank, in this case the Bank of…

The debt overhang in the developed world has lowered aggregate demand globally. As developed economies compete over a dwinding pie by moving toward a policy of economic nationalism, investment opportunities will dwindle. Bill Gross advises…

While this probably isn’t much proof of Keynes liquidity preference, at least in the extreme sense, it does help explain why M1 has grown significantly faster than broader measures of money supply, as cash simply shifts from M2 to M1.