How often do you check your brokerage account? There is a famous economics paper from 1997, written by some of the giants in behavioral finance (Thaler, Kahnemann, Tversky & Schwartz), that tested what is known as myopic loss aversion. What they found was that investors who check their performance less frequently are more willing to take risk and experience higher [...]
Central banks and their staffs have long been accused of trying to hide inflation. This allegation had been a staple of their critics, those charging reckless monetary policies for creating “too much” money that had allegedly been causing price imbalances all over the financial map. The most famous example the Federal Reserve discontinuing M3 early in 2006 – just as [...]
The first seeds of the eventual eurodollar bloom, in domestic US terms, were sown all way back in sixteen – as in the year 1916. Believe it or not, the Federal Reserve Act, then only a few years old, had been modified so that banking syndicates (those able to raise the princely sum of $1 million capital) could form what [...]
As another central bank, the Federal Reserve, seriously contemplates tapering its latest QE, its policymaking members would do well to consider the several others who either did or thought they should. One of them, obviously, the same Fed but back in 2013. Another was the Bank of Japan early in 2018.It was March that year and “monetary” officials gathering around [...]
Central banking’s real monetary power comes from a different kind of printing. We’re all taught and told from the very beginning that it's derived from enjoying the money printer, the ability to stack currency at will. No. In actual fact, monetary policies are all money-less leaving “monetary” authorities to employ instead the press which prints words.Deciding which words, and more [...]
The economic slowdown we've been writing about for months officially arrived last Friday in the form of a particularly weak employment report. The number of new jobs created last month - or at least the WAG the BLS makes at such things on a monthly basis - was a mere 235,000 or roughly a cool half-million less than expected by [...]
Being able to compare European inflation rates with their American counterparts helps expose what’s driving the latter and it’s not inflationary currency. Comparing both of those inflation regimes with the Japanese simply exposes the Bank of Japan and QE. This was perfectly obvious before the Base 2020 CPI estimates came about.Central banks, we’re always told, possess the printing press of [...]
Copper, like lumber, had been the star of the space. Each had rocketed upward beginning last fall representing, for many, the leading edge of the inflationary wave sure to follow. The two garnered that much attention as well as given this much importance because the rest of the commodity class hadn’t really come close to matching their meteoric scale.It was [...]
Today is the 50th anniversary of the "Nixon shock", the day President Richard Nixon closed the gold window and ended the post-WWII Bretton Woods currency agreement. That agreement, largely a product of John Maynard Keynes, pegged the dollar to gold and most other currencies to the dollar. It wasn't a true gold standard as only other countries that were party [...]
Admittedly, there isn’t much economic data released in the back half of every month. So, we’re sort of stretching our gaze into the second (maybe third) tier. But in this case, it’s just by way of reinforcing much what we already know and further what’s been suspected. Over in Japan, the government’s Cabinet Office gathers surveys, cross tabulates results and [...]
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