The ‘gold bugs’ assert that at all times and in all circumstances gold remains money.  For some irrational reason the ‘paper bugs’ cling to their increasingly worthless colored coupons asserting their importance as currency.
The Great Credit Contraction has begun and in the macro sense there is no practical solution to the end of the current [...]

I dropped in on the St. Louis Tea Party event Saturday at Kiener Plaza in St. Louis. Typical sub-par cell phone photo with special glare augmentation A crowd photo by Julie Stone:

My guesstimate — and I’m not great at these things, so I could be way off — is 1,000-1,500 people attending the event. Far [...]

Sheikh Makhtoum won’t go to debtor’s prison, but short of that, Dubai’s all-but-sovereign default is an epochal event in its story. I wrote a column in Financial Express titled Dubai’s great crash where I draw on this episode to think more clearly about (a) International financial centres and (b) Puffery. On this subject, [...]

Retail executives were holding their breath on Friday, looking for indications that the recent recovery would extend into the holiday shopping season. Macy’s CEO Terry Lundgren went on the record with the Wall Street Journal Saturday to assert that early indications of both traffic and sales are pointing to “very good signs” for the December [...]

Tuesday’s Hardtalk on BBC World News (link) discussed the political, economic and social aspects of communism versus liberal capitalism with Slavoj Zizek ,a philosopher and professor at European Graduate School.
Mr. Zizek discussed the role of liberal capitalism in the modern age. He condemned communism as a failure of the mankind and reaffirmed the liberal capitalism [...]

The excellent research edifice at the Bank of International Settlements have conjured up one of those papers which needed to be written (by Claudio Borio and Piti Disyatat) on the back of the myriad of different monetary policy responses we have observed in the contex of the economic crisis. The abstract and conclusion look as [...]

In recent months, a sense has emerged that the exchange-traded currency futures market in India is more liquid than the corresponding contract traded OTC (i.e. the forward market). As an example, we examine a dataset from NSE of 28,797 observations of data – one observation per second – from 3 November 2009, for the November [...]

MOF has setup a working group on foreign investment:
To review the existing policy on foreign inflows, other than Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), such as foreign portfolio investments by Foreign institutional investors (FIIs)/ Non Resident Indians (NRIs) and other foreign investments like Foreign Venture Capital Investor (FVCI) and Private equity entities and suggesting rationalisation of [...]

Recent days have seen continued rebounds in housing, corporate profit reports and consumer confidence.
Two reports early this week point to continued progress in residential housing resales. On Monday the National Association of Realtors implied that the home-buyer tax credit will likely sustain the housing market throughout next year. In October, first-time buyers used the tax [...]

On 26 November 2009 the State Bank of Vietnam devalued the dong by about 5%.  This is the third instance of currency devaluation in two years.  The FRN$ is likewise being devalued against gold.
A few weeks ago I observed that those buying gold in Vietnam are paying a premium and that:
Gold is money and is [...]