interest rates

Thirty years ago, it was "Anarchy in the U.K." as Britain tried to get away from its role as the sick man of Europe. That meant civil unrest, high inflation and a weak economy. Margaret Thatcher was seen by many as the solution. Today,…

The European Central Bank cut its benchmark rate 50 basis points (0.50%) to 2% because of weakness in the Eurozone. While a cut was widely anticipated, it was not known whether the ECB would cut 25 or 50 basis points. However, the cut of…

Is this an unorderly decline for the dollar? These last two days have been bad for the dollar. We are seeing heavy losses against the Swiss Franc, the Euro, the Australian Dollar, and The Japanese Yen.

The U.S. Dollar got more bad news today when the Bank of England (BoE) decided to not follow the U.S. Federal Reserve's lead to a Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP). The BoE was seen as the most likely to follow in the Fed's footsteps as i…

Zero percent interest rates mean a weak currency. The U.S. Dollar is getting hammered. See these charts from the last day and a half of trading. Even the British Pound is cleaning up!

I recently wrote a post about U.S. Treasury securities which have been rising in price as interest rates have come down. In the post, I called the Treasury rise a bubble and I stick by that moniker despite protests from some astute readers.…

To my mind, lowering interest rates in the aftermath of an enormous credit bubble where institutions have just destroyed $1 trillion in capital is wrong. It distorts lending decisions such that yet more money will eventually be lent out…

Recently I wrote a post which claimed that Keynesian stimulus is what we need in the global economy right now. These ideas are considered heresy in Austrian School circles because trying to stimulate the economy out of recession only puts…

The yield on he three-month U.S. treasury bill went below zero for the first time ever. This seems to be an unprecedented move where investors are actually paying the U.S. Government to borrow money. In my estimation, this is not just a…

First the Fed and now the ECB and Bank of England are talking about some form of quantitative easing! Of course, if they are all going to do it, do we have a dollar crash or is it more of a crisis of confidence in fiat currencies in…