Popular myth and, allegedly, the laws of aerodynamics have it that the bumblebee should not be able to take flight. Yet still, our good bumblebee refuses to be pulled down by such details and year after year it takes flight as if nothing has happened. This allegory applies, with some imagination, to Japans economy too. [...]

Trace: Welcome back to the 65th episode of the RunToGold.com podcast. This will be an interview with John Rubino. Welcome John!
John: Hey Trace! How are you?
Trace: Great, great. You’re the author of The Collapse of the Dollar.
John: Co-author.
Trace: Yeah, co-author with James Turk, the founder of Gold Money, and then you also run your own [...]

Watching, monitoring, and analysing the economy and her markets is as much about tracking discourses (and how they change) as it is about perusing data material on various leading and lagging indicators. And thus, as I am still knee deep into putting the last touch on my thesis [1] I thought that I might as [...]

Sometimes no news is more telling than one might initially think and although it was hardly earth shattering for the market that the BOJ chose yesterday to keep its main benchmark rate sitting at 0.1% it does highlight the extraordinary difficulties Japan currently face in terms of sparking its economy back into some kind of [...]

In short, if the world economy is to get through this crisis in reasonable shape, credit worthy surplus countries must expand domestic demand relative to potential output. How they achieve this outcome is up to them. But only in this way can the deficit countries realistically hope to avoid spending themselves into bankruptcy.
Martin Wolf [...]

I shall openly admit that I have always found the exact role of the rating agencies a bit odd in the global financial system. I mean, do we really need them to tell us which bonds are good and which are not? I am not sure and what is more; rating agencies sometimes, if not [...]

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 [...]

If Friday was the day Macro Man had to pay for a wet evening in the company of alcoholic beverages, it was my turn yesterday as I spent the day trying to recover from a night where the amount of alcohol consumed had been beyond excessive. Thus, as I woke up, in agony, some time [...]

If the theoretical discussion in the context of monetary policy, through most of 2009, has been centered on the different tools disposable to central banks in the form of unconvetional measures it seems almost certain that 2010 will be all about putting theory into action. Most notably is of course the much debated concept of [...]