Economy

It remains my position that Congress should not allow the Fed to lend unsecured to foreign central banks without specific Congressional approval. But the Fed does currently have that authority and they are again using it to keep $ LIBOR…

Hoover: "In the larger view the major forces of the depression now lie outside of the United States, and our recuperation has been retarded by the unwarranted degree of fear and apprehension created by these outside forces."

Leverage is the practice of holding a small amount of government currency in reserve against IOUs denominated in the state’s unit of account while promising to convert those IOUs to currency. This can lead to a “run” on private IOUs,…

As I see it, Japan’s problem was that during the 1980s it was so addicted to investment-led growth and artificially cheap financing that it misallocated capital on a massive scale and failed to include the resulting implicit losses in its…

Disposable personal income gains are moderating. In the UK, where the increase in consumer prices is the most elevated in the G7, income in real terms is declining and that has led to a gloomy picture of the UK economy’s prospects.

The FHFA complaints lose explanatory power and persuasiveness because they ignore compensation and accounting. It pays to understand accounting control fraud.

Ed asked me to comment on hidden contingent sovereign liabilities of Danish mortgage bonds given the most recent Absolute Return Letter.

This is excerpted from the American Presidency Project at UCSB. Hoover writes the following letter to George L. Harrison, Federal Reserve Board of New York, on financial and economic problems on 5 Oct 1931

Globally, coincident data is already slowing visibly across the globe with headline PMI readings and trade data coming in steadily lower. In that sense we are up against the wall again only so shortly after the shock of 2008/09 and this…

Chinese goods cost more in China because of currency, taxes, transportation,logistics and inflation. The Chinese get the jobs, while Americans get the consumer products; The Chinese government gets the dollar, but the U.S government gets…