Last week, a decimal point seemed to move to the left. A UN advisory panel had suggested that maybe it was time to figure it out a better way to run the world’s monetary system. Better, that is, than using the U.S. dollar as the reference currency for the whole world.
March 31st, 2009 | Bill Bonner | 6 comments | ContinuedAll Posts Tagged With: "dollar"
The United States: The Largest Ponzi Scheme in the World
The United States is now the largest Ponzi scheme in the world. The only way to pay off the old lenders is to bring in new ones – or run the printing press. That’s all lenders have to worry about – inflation. And for the moment, prices are going down. They’ll keep going down too – until they go up…
February 20th, 2009 | Bill Bonner | 6 comments | Continued
Obama’s Bailout: Too Little, Too Late?
The combination of falling earnings and falling P/Es does to stock prices approximately what the Romans did to Carthage in the third Punic War. That’s why we have our Crash Alert flag flying. Stock prices delenda est. Typically, depressions come with bear markets. And bear markets come with bounces and rallies. We expected an O! Bama! bounce after the election. We got one…but much less than we expected. Stocks only rallied about 15%…
February 19th, 2009 | Bill Bonner | 0 comments | Continued
China is Considering Ways to Diversify Out of the Dollar
Reports in the press this week say that China is considering ways to diversify out of the dollar. The Chinese are no fools. They see what is coming. And they know what it will do to them – the holders of the largest pile of dollars ever assembled. The Financial Times made it perfectly clear to them in a cartoon yesterday. It shows Barack Obama in front of a huge smoking trashcan filled with dollars. The president is pouring on gasoline…
February 16th, 2009 | Bill Bonner | 7 comments | Continued
Wall Street Bankers: The World’s Most Privileged Outcasts
Today we turn our attention to the world’s most privileged outcasts. “Once envied, Wall Street bankers are now mocked,” says a headline at the International Herald Tribune. So many people are getting on the bankers’ case; we’re beginning to feel sorry for them. After all, what did they do wrong? Well…
February 5th, 2009 | Bill Bonner | 1 comment | Continued
In Gono We Trust
We have it from our usually unreliable source in Washington that Gideon Gono, now head of the Zimbabwean central bank, has been called in to aid the Obama Administration. In secret talks, Gono has agreed to replace the out-going Ben Bernanke, who is said to be going to work as a helicopter pilot. Gono will take over the Fed. And a new bill has already been designed – our source was able to sneak out a copy of the new note – for 1 million U.S. dollars. That’s Gideon Gono’s picture on it…
February 4th, 2009 | Bill Bonner | 6 comments | Continued
Wall Street Gets the Boot
Yesterday, President Obama, seeing Wall Street on the mat, walked over and gave it the boot. The $18 billion in bonuses, paid out on to Wall Street honchos last year, were “shameful,” said he. It was the “height of irresponsibility” to take so much capital out of the system when it was losing money, he pointed out. Of course, he’s right. It was certainly irresponsible. And the Wall Street crowd deserves the boot, no doubt about it. But it’s a shame no one mentioned it in 2006 or 2007 – not even Mr. Obama – when the bonuses and the irresponsibility were even higher…
February 2nd, 2009 | Bill Bonner | 0 comments | Continued
A $4 Trillion ‘Big Bang’
In The Monthly, Rudd plants a Neo-Marxist flag in the ground of the current debate with the kind of jargon-laden elitist preening that makes academic critics of the free market (who’ve never spent a day in the business world creating value) so nauseating. (…)Why not proclaim, since he is apparently in the position to make such proclamations, that the experiment in paper money and the deliberate policy of inflation it implies is theft?…
February 2nd, 2009 | Dan Denning | 21 comments | Continued
The Collapse of Complex Asset Values
In the name of “stimulus” and “recovery” and to supposedly correct the excesses of the market, none of the normal free market mechanisms to punish the excesses are being allowed to function. Instead of acknowledging that markets work in boom/bust cycles of progress, excess, and consolidation, today’s generation of policy leaders want to eliminate cycles to preserve their fictitious wealth and power!…
January 29th, 2009 | Dan Denning | 7 comments | Continued
Circle September 26th on Your Monetary Calendar
Bankers are bankers, after all. Their product is money. But they have gold in their vaults for a reason. It was money before paper was money. So September 26th may mark the end of the orderly and coordinated management of gold sales by European Central Banks. And it may mark the beginning of a new monetary era where gold reasserts its importance as money…
January 28th, 2009 | Dan Denning | 2 comments | Continued