On 9 December 2009 Representative Ron Paul introduced H.R. 4248 the Free Competition in Currency Act of 2009.  This Act has the potential to impact the investment world more than any other legislation that has been enacted for decades.  The impact on the bond market, Treasury market, stock market and general economy would be tremendous [...]

The Great Credit Contraction grinds on as the system continues evaporating.  People are realizing the true nature of the worldwide fiat currency and fractional reserve banking system that is built on a fraudulent premise and has become a Ponzi scam of epic proportions, the largest in the history of the world.  Capital, both real and [...]

Back in the olden days, people simply bartered products.  One might trade a couple of loaves of bread for a fish.  In order to ease this process so people didn’t have to bring their produce to market, over time people turned to gold, later paper money backed by gold and ultimately paper money backed by [...]

1. The interest rate is a price – the price of credit like the price of any good.  In a free market the price would be set like the price of any good at the intersection of the supply of funds (our savings), and demand for funds (businesses’ and individuals’ investing [...]

Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, started 2010 off by devaluing the Venezuelan bolivar by 50% from 4.3 per dollar from 2.15 per dollar, along with several other silly little limits.  This is continuing the theme of currency devaluations from late 2008 and 2009.  But the evaporation of currency is not only limited to third world [...]

This piece was written before Christmas and will appear in the first 2010 edition of the Forex Journal. The data covers the market up until mid December.
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Old Maid is a card game where the simple task is to avoid holding a given card (often the queen of spades) at the end. Even in the company [...]

Last week was a good lesson in terms of what might, or what might not, happen when policy makers attempt to steer currency markets. Notwithstanding the obvious question of much how clout policy makers de-facto holds with respect to moving currency markets (not a lot I think), the outgoing finance minister in Japan Hirohisa Fujii [...]

Many people believe that the exchange rate regime (i.e. the monetary policy regime) of each country is its own sovereign choice.
In the Great Depression, we saw the harmful effects of the exchange rate mercantalism that is feasible with fiat money. This was a key motivation for Keynes and others in their design of the post-war [...]

The FRN$ has been the world’s reserve currency for decades.  As a result, the breadth and depth of the capital markets add tremendous liquidity to the fiat currency illusion.
This is one of the reasons the FRN$ is near the bottom of the liquidity pyramid and rises in value with each round of the credit contraction. [...]

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 [...]