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 [...]

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 [...]

Two interesting quotes caught my eye in a recent Andy Smith note:
“We cannot stop terrorism or defeat the ideologies of violent extremism when hundreds of millions of young people see a future with no jobs, no hope, and no way ever to catch up to the developed world” Hillary Clinton, Remarks to the Center for [...]

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 [...]

Howard Davies was a deputy governor of the Bank of England, and the first head of the UK FSA. He is one of the world’s leading thinkers on financial regulation and monetary policy, and one of the people who combines skills in both finance and monetary economics. In a recent article, he focuses [...]

There is a lot of concern about inflation. Most of it is based on perusing the following numbers of the year-on-year changes in price indexes:

Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct

CPI (IW)
11.9
11.7
11.6
11.5

WPI
-0.7
-0.2
0.5
1.3

WPI Food
13.3
14.0
15.7
13.4

WPI fruits,vegs
15.5
12.0
24.6
11.1

True inflation in India is somewhere between the CPI-IW (which overstates the importance of food) and the WPI (which overstates the importance of tradeables and thus the exchange [...]

 On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve underscored that the U.S. economy is picking up steam but reassured observers that inflation is in check that that it will keep short-term interest rates near zero for an “extended period.”
In their statement after the meeting, the members concluded that the US economy has continued to “pick up,” that declines [...]

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. [...]

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke gave his views on many topics on Monday afternoon.
Although he remains cautious his conclusions were in line with latest FOMC meeting minutes that calling for a modest recovery in 2010.
His bottom line: “…my best guess at this point is that we will continue to see modest economic growth next year–sufficient [...]

Reserve Bank of Australia decided to continue the increase in benchmark interest rates by 25 basis points to 3.75 percent in the light of short-term inflationary expectations (link). Here (link) is a brief macroeconomic outlook of Australia.