On a recent trip to Sydney I visited the Reserve Bank of Australia’s Museum of Australian Currency Notes. From the displays comes the following interesting information about prices in “the 1900’s”:
6 shillings a week for meat
16 shillings a week for groceries
25 shillings a week for rent
£250 for a Model T Ford
House equal to 10 times [...]

The US government is in debt to the tune of $13 trillion.
Estimates of the US government’s unfunded future liabilities run to more than $100 trillion.
Hey, we can fix it!
The US uses a fiat currency. There’s no problem, in theory, with temporarily pegging that currency to another, or accepting/offering another currency in payment of debt.
All Congress [...]

For those goldbugs of a libertrian/Austrian economics bent (most seem to be, funnily enough) this organisation is likely to be of interest. Their mission:
We aim to strengthen the free market system in Western Australia and Australia, by promoting ideals of voluntary co-operation, choice, personal rights, limited government and responsible resourcefulness of individuals.
The Liberal Democratic Party [...]

Well, it’s not ‘the end of history’, as Francis Fukuyama originally forecast in 1989. As events, as much as Samuel Huntington’s 1993 counter-thesis ‘The Clash of Civilisations’, have shown. For Fukuyama, it was ‘the politics’ that mattered. And these ‘ended’ when the Berlin Wall fell and, soon after, victory in the Cold War was declared [...]

Extract from Gold Standards and the Real Bills Doctrine in U.S. Monetary Policy by Richard Timberlake. The references to “Bernanke 1993″ are to Ben Bernanke’s 1993 article “The World on a Cross of Gold” in the Journal of Monetary Economics.
Ben Bernanke, in a laudatory review of Golden Fetters, agrees with its main thesis. “Eichengreen,” Bernanke [...]

Toby Connor has an essay posted at goldseek.com with a title that I find very intriguing, namely “The Strong Hand Theory” because it sounds like it could be all sorts of terrific things, ranging from a new Sherlock Holmes mystery to “How to destroy brick buildings with a karate chop with your bare hand and [...]

I had a conference to attend in Southern California last week but the true capstone was a Sunday evening dinner with several readers. Although ‘gold bugs’ may be perceived in their writing as cranky I have found them to be among the most considerate and cultured company. Perhaps it stems from their respect for individual [...]

Barry Eichengreen wrote a thorough defence of China’s exchange rate policy response to the global demands for letting the Renminbi appreciate and thus stimulate the reduction of US trade deficit.
US Treasury Department recently launched a series of initiatives which labeled China as a currency manipulator and a true source of America’s widening trade deficit and [...]

The Financial Times had the article “Greenspan Mauled Over Role In Meltdown”, which was about that loathsome, worthless lunatic Alan Greenspan testifying at the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which is enough to make you laugh in itself; the morons who perpetrated constant deficit-spending are facing off with the guy who provided the money and credit [...]

The recent rupee appreciation, followed by rumours of RBI appreciation, has set off fears that we’re in for a repeat of the sad episode of monetary policy 2006/2007 all over again.
Writing in the Business Standard, Shankar Acharya repeats the advice that he gave [...]