One quick note about this: there is obviously plenty of inflation in the prices you pay every day. But most consumer price indices are rigged to understate inflation, as our colleague David Evans pointed out yesterday in Canberra at the Gold Standard Institute conference in Canberra. Trimmed medians…hedonic adjustments…
November 2nd, 2009 | Dan Denning | 5 comments | ContinuedAll Posts Tagged With: "U.S. Treasury bonds"
Cash is Created When the Feds “Monetize the Debt” by Buying US Treasury Bonds
Are you kidding, dear reader? After being the single largest buyer on the planet? Imagine what will happen to the bond market when investors realize that the Fed is selling! It’s not going to happen.
October 23rd, 2009 | Bill Bonner | 5 comments | Continued
Dollar is Merely Retreating in Good Order
Remember the famous German general von Kluck, from whom we get the expression, ‘you dumb kluck?’ Von Kluck was chasing the French down the Marne in 1914. Victory looked like it was close at hand. The French were pulling back.
October 22nd, 2009 | Bill Bonner | 39 comments | Continued
Warren Buffett: People Do Not Make Money by Betting Against the US Economy
What we saw was an over-stretched empire getting ready to snap. But we were also allowing ourselves to be lazy. Rather than deconstruct the capital structure of the world’s largest economy, we decided to sell the whole damned thing.
October 12th, 2009 | Bill Bonner | 5 comments | Continued
When People Fear Inflation or a Falling Dollar They Find Refuge in Gold
Gold is also a target of greedy speculators sometimes, even when the going is good. According to a study done by the World Gold Council, you never know what gold will do.
October 5th, 2009 | Bill Bonner | 1 comment | Continued
A Deep-water Oil Find Off the Coast of West Africa
About twenty minutes later we found ourselves tucked away in Café Paradis reading about the latest deep-water oil find off the coast of West Africa. The positive drilling results in the Venus well off the coast of Sierra Leone are not far from the Jubilee field Ghana, which is Africa’s largest deep-water oil field. It could be, so the experts say, the next big off-shore oil bonanza.
September 18th, 2009 | Dan Denning | 3 comments | Continued
What Evil Sends Investors Running to the Protection of Gold?
The press attributed this week’s rise in gold to benign causes. The end of the world seems to have been postponed – indefinitely. Bloomberg reported that a clear majority of those polled thought the world economy was recovering.
September 14th, 2009 | Bill Bonner | 1 comment | Continued
A Credit Depression
You don’t need to own subprime loans to take loan losses in a credit depression. Smith said the area that concerned him most was the surge in small and mid-size businesses simply closing up shop unexpectedly. “In the real economy,” he said, “there is no evidence that the world economy is yet bottoming.”
April 30th, 2009 | Dan Denning | 5 comments | Continued
Citi Reports $4.69 Billion in Fixed Income Trading
So the banks have returned to profitability have they? That was the theme on the market last week. And if it were true, a recovery in bank balance sheets is just the sort of thing that might precede a recovery in the economy. But it probably isn’t true. Here’s why…
April 20th, 2009 | Dan Denning | 22 comments | Continued
Feds to Buy Government Debt
Yes, dear reader, when Richard Nixon cut the link between the dollar and gold, the world has been using a money system that is, to put it in its best light, experimental. The last experiments of this sort – on anything like this scale – were conducted in the 18th century. The Banque Generale was set up by that rogue, John Law, to buy up the debt of France – of which there was plenty.
March 20th, 2009 | Bill Bonner | 0 comments | Continued