Monetary System

FDIC Chair Sheila Bair spoke with Bloomberg News yesterday and the topic was interest rates and banks ability to withstand a higher interest rate environment. While Bair was careful to stress that this is not a "short-term…

by Claus Vistesen With course work coming up and with my internet connection just coming on-stream this weekend I hope that I can be forgiven for not posting in the past week. And now that I am I can only find the energy to move in with…

Irving Fisher was a leading economist in the early 20th century. After being caught out during the Great Depression (he famously quipped, "Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau." right before the…

Here we go again: the dollar appears to be under sustained attack in the foreign exchange market. To judge from its latest FOMC statement, the Federal Reserve appears to be actively encouraging inflation: “The Committee will continue to…

TARP goes to the legal graveyard this Sunday. Looking back, Simon Johnson says some sort of injection into the American banking system was necessary. So, in a basic sense TARP or some Swedish equivalent would have been necessary to avoid…

by Michael Hudson, President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City and author of…

See video below for a discussion of this theme (hat tip Barry Ritholtz). This is a very good video for learning about how debt deflationary spirals are created by the "fallacy of composition" and how it applies to countries in a…

Since the beginning of 2008, 291 banks and thrifts have failed in the United States. Georgia leads the way with 37. Source: Interactive Bank Failure Map – WSJ.com

During this credit crisis, you keep hearing talking heads act as if deflation is the worst thing that could hit an economy. Just a few years ago we kept hearing people talking about inflation as if it were the thing to avoid. Now suddenly,…

BBC HARDtalk interviewed hedge fund manager Hugh Hendry, CIO & CEO of Eclectica Asset Management, this past Tuesday night. The videos are below.