Was it all mere window dressing? A con pulled by cunning Communists who needed to secure the collateral security of an intended transition toward the opposite direction? What a difference a few years makes, then, given how when Xi Jinping began his term in 2012 the word most in the West used to describe his agenda was “reform.” Every strongman [...]
I think because the big, public failures of GFC1 haven’t repeated the public has been given a false sense of stability. While the idea of subprime mortgages being responsible for all that went on during 2008 has remained generally accepted, there was for a time an awakened recognition that big financial firms were doing complicated things in the monetary shadows [...]
There are those people who will remain convinced forever forward that the Federal Reserve is run by capable technocrats absolutely skilled at maintaining for the free peoples of the United States their financial freedom. At a general level, they are thought to do so by signaling to market and economic participants just how these should respond to monetary policy inputs. [...]
44.1 Linking the Long and Great Depressions to TodaySocial upheaval, mass unemployment and economic desperation - this isn't the first time. We look at how the modern unemployment rate came about during the crises of The Long Depression. Also, real GDP-per-capita growth comparisons between The Long and Great Depressions to today. [Emil’s Summary] Ad Astra is Latin for "to the stars", [...]
Is there a charmed fiscal number that unlocks the inflationary promised-land? Central bank Economists have spent more than a decade in the West, two in Japan, desperately seeking the magic number QE. Though their own research is substantial and conclusive that LSAP’s like QE don’t work, and never have, officials conclude instead that it always comes up short because it [...]
There are those people who will remain convinced forever forward that the Federal Reserve is run by evil geniuses absolutely intent upon robbing the free peoples of the United States of their financial freedom. As evidence, they point to one unsuccessful, controversial monetary policy after another, none of them effective at accomplishing their main task of putting the economic and [...]
If you remember 2018’s economic “boom”, you’ll likely recall that year’s second quarter. Set up by December 2017’s Tax Cut and Jobs Act, when the BEA published GDP estimates for those three months that July, the unusual 4% growth rate seemed to have confirmed the positive effects of tax reform “stimulus” funded by a substantial increase in the fiscal deficit. [...]
China isn’t the only country actively resisting the “stimulus” certainties which go for inarguable wisdom around most of the rest of the world. Xi Jinping has stated his case very plainly, only no one wants to listen to the dictator; or at least take him literally. People would rather believe there’s only the one way to respond to big economic [...]
The post-Pfizer vaccine rush pushed most of the contango out of the WTI futures curve. The aftermath of the Georgia Senate vote, and with it dreams of even larger, more carefree fiscal “stimulus”, drained all the rest. As of this week, the entire crude curve is once more contango-free; backwardation front to back.The physical markets have been able to fundamentally [...]
43.2 Asset Bubbles & Money Financed Fiscal ExpansionHow does one define an asset bubble? Might there be fundamental, non-speculative reasons why prices are persistently high? Also, why did money-financed fiscal expansion fail in Japan? What does that experience tell us about the present? [Emil’s Summary] As many listeners have long suspected, your podcast host did, as a child, run away and [...]
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