deflation

I am going to be speaking on a panel on "Investing in Inflation" tomorrow. And I thought I would put forward some ideas here regarding what I intend to say. The key word describing where we are is biflation, meaning inflation in some things…

Japan has joined the crowd and started an even more aggressive asset purchase program as the Japanese economy weakens. Meanwhile, serious tax hikes are poised to go into effect very soon. Japan plans to cut state spending because the…

The US inflation indexed treasury curve (TIPS curve) has inverted sharply in the short end. The one-year TIPS yield went from negative 2.5% to zero in a matter of four months. The one-year treasury (nominal) yield on the other hand has held…

Kondratieff waves are these supercycles that a lot of people have been talking about in the context of the great leveraging that led to crisis in developed economies. We appear to be at the end of one of these waves in bond markets…

The country’s debt dynamics are far from unsustainable at this point, but given the weakening in the country’s export performance and the steady unwinding of the housing boom we can now anticipate I would expect growth to be weaker than…

European leaders will meet again on December 9th in an attempt to come up with the solution. The important point, though, is that the probable solution would call for European nations to surrender some sovereignty over fiscal policy to a…

So here we are, with the ECB demanding deflationary austerity from the member nations in return for the limited bond buying that has been sustaining some semblance of national government solvency, not seeming to realize it can’t inflate…

My friend Rob Parenteau doesn’t think it will. His argument against it is similar to the one I have been making about the origins of this crisis. Here’s what I said.

How does manufacturing CPI inflation benefit an economy in which incomes are falling? When inflation rises and incomes are stagnant or falling, the economy rolls over.

The following is a brief outline of "Gold and the 'Flations," published in the April 2005 Gloom, Boom & Doom Report. General talk has it that gold is a hedge against inflation. We might take this a step further and conclude that a…