financial history

Jeremy Grantham is seriously bearish again. In part 2 of his latest quarterly newsletter, he departs from the peak resources argument he made in part 1 and focuses on the overvaluation in stocks. His advice: sell!

Below are two charts from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The first shows the US Consumer Price Index for all urban consumers from 1913 through March. The second shows the same data from 1990. The US has generally had a positive…

Systemic risk is not driven by close macro integration. If this were the case, US states would have far higher exposure to systemic credit risk. Instead, systemic exposure is very high for European sovereigns. The roots of systemic risk lie…

Unemployment insurance for 21st century in the form of a jobs program could end the malinvestment and predations of politicians and foster a strong economy. We need jobs but we must be mindful of predator state capitalism. My proposal below…

LURING THE UNSOPHISTICATED into the stock market was considered a risk by Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan in 1994. So much so, that protecting the individual investor was a mandate of the Fed. (The Fed advertises and then omits new…

Below is a framework that delineates the ideology and economics of two groups of economic thought that are much talked about in the wake of the Credit Crisis: the Chartalists and the Austrians. These two groups are considered outside of the…

In April 1989, Mexico's external debt negotiator, Angel Gurria, asked his country's commercial bank creditors for a 55 percent haircut. This was the opening pitch of the newly created Brady Plan, which finally addressed both the debt…

Fred Sheehan argues that it is unlikely that Ben Bernanke will raise rates. He says either the market or a successor will do so. He adds that there are several similarities between current trends and those in 1994, a year when many…

By William K. Black cross-posted from New Economic Perspectives In the Savings and Loan (S&L) debacle Speaker Wright became enraged at the Federal Home Loan Bank Board and the Department of Justice when he learned that the FBI was…

Here's a great graph of US income tax rates back to when personal income taxes were started. You can see the marginal rate for personal income has come way down from its 1945 peak. A few months ago, Michael Hudson answered the question,…