Monetary System

In March I wrote an American version of this post which pointed to the bailout culture in America as a major reason I fear a depressionary relapse. American policy makers have shifted private losses onto the government's books while…

Here's something I want to run by you on behavioural economics and the way economic issues are being debated in the blogosphere. We are witnessing an implosion of long-held belief structures that go the core of how we believed our economic…

When bankruptcy comes, it does so normally as a result of a liquidity crisis. This is true for countries as much as it is for companies. It's not as if someone in charge walks in one day and says "you are insolvent so you must default…

Econ 101 Imagine you and I are the only two people in an economy. For the sake of argument, say we use sea shells as a currency and we trade with no one else but each other. So when we do trade, we exchange goods and services with each…

For all the seven long years since the signing of the Maastricht treaty started Europe on the road to that unified currency, critics have warned that the plan was an invitation to disaster. Indeed, the standard scenario for an EMU…

Marshall Auerback here with a post which I originally published at New Deal 2.0. This post on deficits in fiat currency regimes is the second in a series of posts on Modern Monetary Theory. Many market analysts, commentators and economists…

Meredith Whitney talks to Bloomberg's Jonathan Weil in a wide-ranging interview about the banking sector. This is a good one – the best I have seen - because you get to hear Whitney's views on the sector's stocks from a fundamental and a…

Let's attack the question of hyperinflation using Zimbabwe and Weimar Germany as examples. These are the two most extreme cases of hyperinflation that economic historians have ever witnessed. They are instructive regarding what causes…

I have written a number of posts which point to a shift in the center of power on Wall Street from the client-facing advisory business to the market-making trading business. I think understanding this shift is vital to understanding what…

On this edition of Peter Lavelle's 'CrossTalk' he asks his three guests including me whether the US Senate hearings humiliating Goldman Sachs are merely a show trial with the aim of watering down global financial reform. Take a look at what…