I got a disturbing email from Bianco Research which showed a chart of “Private Credit Market Debt” which they say shows “Total credit market creation not including Treasury Debt, Municipal Debt and Agency Debt”.
It is actually a horror that the level of private debt peaked last year at about $36 trillion, which is certainly a [...]

The great monetary scientist Isaac Newton, who served as England’s Master of the Mint for 24 years, also did some ancillary work in physics.  The laws of Newtonian physics are known by nearly everyone and are often used by analogy to apply logical reasoning in other fields.  In this case, a few of these laws [...]

In thinking of protectionism, the Great Depression, the Great Recession, and what might come next, here are two interesting angles.
Governments with their backs against the wall
Ideally, stabilisation using monetary and fiscal policy, alongside actions by the private sector, should restrain the decline in consumption, and yield conditions which are not too harsh for households. At [...]

I recently came to a rather obvious, yet remarkable insight. The 20th century was a truly unique and remarkable moment in human history. There is not a single aspect of human civilization that changed less during the 20th than in any of the centuries that came before. Population, economic output, [...]

I’ve never really got why a gradual deflationary bias was a problem. Consumers know, for example, that just about any electronic good (computers, plasma screens etc) will get cheaper in the future, yet this does not seem to stop them from being made and bought. The fact that only those people who really really want [...]

I have been thinking a lot about the meaning of saving money. Which brings me to what I call the fundamental question of finance: How does forgoing consumption today translate to increased consumption in the future?
In thinking about this question I have identified six distinct answers to this question:
The dog: Place a bowl [...]

Earlier this year it seemed the United States would skirt recession or at worst find a shallow bottom and recover handily in the early part of 2009. However, there’s been a dramatic shift in circumstances in the intervening months, and this is no longer a matter of skinny dipping. After the impact of the credit [...]

I was living in Mexico in the mid-1980s when I decided to get serious about my health and fitness. I began by sponsoring a basketball team in a city league in Merida, Yucatan.
Running the court with kids half my age helped to get me in the best physical condition of my life. Paying for [...]