Recently, more and more Federal Reserve officials have been going on record to say that they believe there is no need to extend the second round of quantitative easing (or QE2) beyond its planned June deadline.Some of them, such as St. Louis Fed President James Bullard, have even publicly stated that the Fed should stop short of buying the entire...
Friday, March 25, 2011
Information and meaning
Hat-tip to Bret Swanson, who recently linked to three thought-provoking book reviews of the new book by James Gleick entitled "The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood."The three articles -- by Nicholas Carr, John Horgan, and Freeman Dyson -- hint at the deep issues explored by Gleick concerning information and meaning, centered around the seminal...
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Understanding where the banking system is right now
Economist Scott Grannis has a noteworthy discussion of the current state of the monetary policy in the US over at his Calafia Beach Pundit blog.In it, he observes that "the Fed has dumped a ton of reserves into the banking system, but banks have been either unwilling to make new loans, or the economy has no desire to take on more debt, or both." ...
Friday, March 18, 2011
Creative destruction continues
Kris Tuttle at Research 2.0 has an excellent article today entitled "Who Pays?" which discusses the latest New York Times attempts to get people to pay for their content*. He examines the many issues surrounding free versus paid content, and the problems that arise from "existing companies trying to apply old models to the new online medium."Kris...
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Be centered, be still -- 2011
We, along with the rest of the civilized world, are of course horrified at the awful developments in Japan as a result of the massive earthquake and tsunami.From an investment perspective, in times of great catastrophe or calamity, our professional experience suggests that the best response for investors is to pursue a philosophy which we describe...
Monday, March 14, 2011
The question of our time, continued
Here is a recent interview with economist Veronique de Rugy, discussing the tremendous increase in unfunded pension liabilities that state governments in the US have racked up in recent decades.Dr. de Rugy presents evidence that the problem is much larger than many states are willing to admit, in part because state accountants are projecting that...
Monday, March 07, 2011
Inflation is a monetary phenomenon
We've written before that inflation is everywhere and always a monetary phenomenon. This morning during a brief televised interview, Gerry Frigon made that point and countered the notion that economic growth creates inflation.The idea that economic growth creates inflation, and that economic stagnation or contraction counteracts inflation, is associated...
Wednesday, March 02, 2011
Blocking out the benefits of free enterprise
Economist Scott Grannis recently published an excellent discussion of the problem with healthcare in the United States entitled "The big problem with healthcare? It's not a market."He provides a graph showing that consumers now pay only 12% of total healthcare costs theselves -- the rest is paid for by insurance companies or the government. As his...
