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The recent movement in global markets has me scratching my head a bit. You have people dumping gold and the Swiss Franc in order to invest in the U.S. dollar and Treasury securities. Everyone says it is a flight to quality. I do not…

I have felt for sometime that dollar strength is a counter-trend that has a sell-by date written all over it. You see, the Federal Reserve is ballooning its balance sheet like nobody's business as it tries to be the global lender of last…

The United States had been living beyond its means for a very long time before the credit crisis finally hit. The truth of the matter is that U.S. monetary and fiscal policy rewarded risk-taking and leverage at the expense of prudence and…

CNBC and other media sources are reporting that a number of hedge funds are collapsing under the weight of poor performance and massive fund redemption. Given the market volatility in credit, sick, bond and currency markets, it was only a…

In 1999, Edward Chancellor wrote a wonderful book called "Devil Take The Hindmost," which I recommend to anyone who is interested in the history of bubbles, financial speculation, and market panics. In it, Chancellor traces the origins of…

It's about 7:45 AM ET as I write this and the overseas stock markets are getting hammered. I can't say I don't fear what is going to happen today because I do. We are witnessing a meltdown of unimaginable proportions that is not just…

If you haven't noticed, credit is hard to come by these days. And the data are finally showing this state of affairs. The latest data from August show that consumer credit plunged by $7.9 billion, the most since record keeping…

This morning Chris Whalen made some comments on CNBC that hit the nail on the head regarding the U.S. banking crisis: there is a huge wave of old-fashioned loan losses coming down the pike. The writedowns we have seen to date are largely…

I named my blog "Credit Writedowns" because I anticipated an historic wave of credit writedowns in the global banking system which would lead to a wave of deleveraging, systemic risk, and bank failures -- in short, a massive financial and…

The serial bailouts by the U.S. government and Hank Paulson's $700 billion bailout proposal have had very negative repercussions for the U.S. Dollar. The dollar is down against all major currencies, as well as gold, silver and oil. It…