history

As Treasury bond yields tumble to record lows we’re hearing lots of talk the U.S. is following the economic trajectory of Japan. Not so fast! Take a look at the following chart.

In the US, there is a heated debate about America’s government pension scheme Social Security. The Republican frontrunner for President Rick Perry has called it a ‘Ponzi scheme’, for which he was derided by the previous Republican…

This extra $4.5 trillion of household mortgage debt is a terrible burden on the economy since consumers make up over 70% of our economy. This is why consumer spending has been so tepid over the past few years. U.S. consumers spent well…

This is excerpted from the American Presidency Project at UCSB. Hoover writes the following letter to George L. Harrison, Federal Reserve Board of New York, on financial and economic problems on 5 Oct 1931

On a floating exchange rate, the government’s own IOUs—currency—are nonconvertible in the sense that the government makes no promise to convert them to precious metal, to foreign currency, or to anything else. Instead, it promises only to…

The adoption of the Constitution of the Kingdom of Denmark Act in 1849 provided the first regulatory framework and Danish mortgage financing has ever since been tightly regulated, ensuring an entirely unblemished track record with not a…

An excerpt from the August 1932 Republican Nomination Acceptance Speech by Herbert Hoover and commentary about his policy choices and ours today

After posting the W bottoms on the S&P500 and the Brazil ETF here is our favorite, the Korea ETF (EWY). We learned during the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis never to short Korea and never underestimate the resolve of the Korean people.

Rick Bookstaber argues that the rise of the super-elite is not a product of educational differences, but rather a result of the new capitalism which creates bigger winners, and does so much more quickly than in the capital-intensive…

This week we examine coinage from Roman times to the present in Western society.