financial history

The great Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran once wrote that sometimes the mountain is clearer from the plane than the summit.  This insight may be applied to the foreign exchange market.   Currencies in the modern era, not backed…

The following is a post by Marc Chandler, head of Brown Brother Harriman’s Currency Strategy Team. For more of BBH’s currency views, visit the website here. We have argued that the EU faces a horrible dilemma.  One horn is the moral…

I first featured some commentary by Fred Sheehan in November on a muni post The coming collapse of the municipal bond market. Now Fred is back and he’s on the radio, talking with Jim Puplava about Sir Alan Greenspan this time.  It will…

Those are the numbers. But this month’s unemployment rate and the non-farm payrolls number are less important this go round. The devil is in the details here because we have some major benchmark revisions and that means changes to…

Last week, I wrote a post “Is the recession dating committee preparing for a double dip?” the gist of which was to question whether the NBER recession data committee thought a double dip was likely.  But an e-mail exchange I had this…

I re-posted my April 2009 post, “Barack Obama as Herbert Hoover” in response to the recent deficit reduction gimmick offered up by the Obama Administration and Marshall’s similarly titled “Barack Hoover Obama.”  The point of my post…

Every instinct the President has honed, every voice he hears in Washington, every inclination of our political culture urges incrementalism, urges deliberation, and an abundance of caution, particularly in regard to our “unsustainable…

As I indicated in my post Grading Obama’s economic policy after one year, I see the President as a triangulating center-left politician of the Bill Clinton variety. The reason we have seen public policy which has been favorable to big…

I love this quote from Thaler on how, when and why the economics profession will change: Thaler: What is the old line—that science progresses funeral by funeral? Nobody changes their mind. What will happen is that the economists are…

The Big Picture has picked up on what appears to be an interesting development over at the NBER’s site. It seems like they are hedging there bets on a possible double dip recession beginning in late 2010 or 2011. As you may know, the NBER…