About a year ago, Argentina – which has inflated away and/or defaulted on its currency every few decades for the past century – issued 100-year
In interviews, whenever I try to make the case that US policies are leading to the kinds of currency disruptions common in developing countries, I
If you’re running a business and the price of one thing goes up, you can work around it by economizing elsewhere. But when everything –
Economists have been struggling to explain how unemployment can fall to 4% without wages starting to accelerate. The following chart shows paychecks rising at about
It’s easy to dismiss seasonality in the price of a tradable asset. After all, if supply and demand fluctuate regularly you’d think the resulting arbitrage
Back in 2005 a reporter took a tour of General Motors’ headquarters, and in the resulting article one thing stood out: The executives and engineers
Big companies report blow-out earnings. Home prices soar. North Korea promises to end its nuke program, possibly averting another Asian war. And stocks fall. Does
Let’s start with Caterpillar, the maker of earth moving equipment that has for years been the poster child for global slowdown. Every quarter was worse
Automtaic Earth’s Raúl Ilargi Meijer just posted an essential essay on the world’s financial markets – or what used to be the world’s financial markets.
Pensions really are in crisis, but the story is so full of large numbers, obscure projections, and dry terms like “unfunded liabilities” that not many
Back in the 1500s, a financial agent of Queen Elizabeth I named Thomas Gresham observed that that “bad money drives out good.” That is, if
Cornflakes and milk may or may not be getting more expensive, but some higher-profile things are rocking like it’s 1979. Houses, for example: Home prices
Silver’s popping today. Which is what people following the futures market action have been expecting for several months now. Speculators – usually wrong at big
“War” and “pensions” are conceptually about as different as it’s possible to be. But – in a measure of how far into Crazy Town we’ve
When an entity needs to borrow ever-greater amounts of money to survive, the markets – that is, the people who are being asked to lend
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