Monetary System

The average interest rate for a savings account today is 0.45%. It wasn't that long ago that one could easily earn 5% in a well-chosen savings account, like those offered by ING Direct, or bump that up by a point or two by putting money…

MF Global may prove to be yet another example of how meaningless the word “bonus” has become. One of the trustees overseeing the broken firm wants to pay out hundreds of thousands of dollars to three executives who used to report to Jon…

The troubling paradox is that the strongest proponents of “broken windows” theory and policies in the blue collar crime context are the strongest opponents of applying analogous policies in the elite white collar crime context.

In an entirely fraudulent paper chase, the banks that borrowed LTRO money put some of it to work in sovereign carry trades. The banks have borrowed at 0.25% from the ECB and are buying sovereign bonds with much higher yields. Intesa…

That Weidmann now wishes to publicly claim he is concerned about risk associated with the Bundesbank's Target2 credit does not simply mean that this is a truth that has now been "acknowledged". I would guess that the sober Bundesbank…

I caught this comment by Scott Fulwiler on a blog post a 3spoken: the notion that firms can spend and reduce net saving in order to increase net saving of the household sector--while theoretically true and true in an accounting…

This was the question put to the ECB's Klaus Masuch by one persistent Irish journalist. The answer from Masuch was a complete dodge, a non-answer, because everyone knows that the Irish government has heaped what rightfully should be…

This is a good and in-depth interview with Bill Black conducted by George Mason economics professor Russ Roberts. I highly recommend your listening to it

Looks like there’s a storm brewing in the U.S. repo markets. It figures: profit-center banks have every motivation to stay one step ahead of the regs and the pols. Since the gamekeepers have now gotten around to looking at proprietary…

Cyprus is not an important player on the world's financial stage but it does bear noting that banking and sovereign debt problems run both wide and deep in the European Union. The latest news underscoring these difficulties comes via Fitch,…