financial history

In the US, the question has to be centered around consumer inflation expectations and what impact this will have on core inflation going forward. In Asia, the question is what impact will rising inflation have on interest rates and goods…

For those of us who remember the Japanese rise and subsequent meltdown in the 1980s and 1990s, what is going on now is like deja-vu all over again. Except this time it is on a bigger scale. Remember Yamaichi, Nikko, Nomura and Daiwa? These…

Zeitenwende, a German-language blog from Switzerland I subscribe to made a very good point this past holiday weekend after the Dow reached bear territory. U.S. investors had lost 20% on the Dow, but European investors would have lost much…

Here are some charts from the latest issue of Barron's. They have a readable article on bear markets (for those of you subscribed to it) as the Dow was down over 20% last week. That's supposed to mark the beginning of a bear market as the…

Japan suffered one of the most horrific market meltdowns in history from 1984-2004. Only four years after the last market bottom and on the verge of another global market downturn, it even may be too early to use the past tense to describe…

Bear markets are not an orgy of pain with indices going straight down. Along the way, there are always brief rallies which bring optimism that the worst is over.

The UK government came up with a new inflation data series in the 1990s to replace the RPI for tracking consumer price inflation. Many people believe this series, the CPI, understates the inflation actually experienced by consumers in the…

This newsletter from John Mauldin arrived in my inbox this morning. If you haven't read his newsletters they are very good, including those from Guest commentators like this one from James Montier. I will add the text in full. It is…

These two charts are interesting just for historical purposes. This tracks the FTSE All-share index from 1800-2007. While there were a number of peaks and valleys, the FTSE went pretty much nowhere until after World War II. At that…

The world has experienced three periods of extreme financial dislocation in the past century, 1929, 1973, and 1990. Two of these have been deflationary. While most observers have their eyes firmly peeled on 1973 and its aftermath, 1929 and…