My kind of town (Chicago?)
Quite a bit of media attention has been devoted recently to a working paper by two International Monetary Fund economists that re-examines the “Chicago…
The free market’s slow death
Much has been made in the press of the manipulation of LIBOR, without much explanation of the consequences for prices of all things that…
Gold bullion flowing from West to East
Earlier this month Eric Sprott circulated a paper, co-authored by him, which concluded that Western central banks have considerably less physical gold than they…
Czech national bank vice governor Hampl on the Czech economy and the eurozone
Earlier this week I interviewed Mr Hampl of the Czech National Bank. He made a number of interesting observations concerning his own country, the…
Money printing is the only thing keeping the system afloat
Last Monday GoldMoney published my article showing the frightening growth in money-quantities for the US dollar. In that article I stated that the hyperbolic…
The SCO, China, Iran, and gold
I make no apology for returning to the subject of China, its role in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and gold. Gold is now a…
Helicopter Ben flies again
Some of the dust from Ben Bernanke’s “QE3” announcement on 13 September has settled. The Federal Reserve is now committed to spending $40 billion a month…
Animal spirits
The BBC is running a three-part series on notable economists, starting with Keynes. There were a number of errors made, but I shall ignore…
A new gold standard?
The US Republican Party recently announced its intention to set up a “gold commission”, to examine the feasibility or not of returning to a…
Central bankers and politicians are running out of ideas
My father, who at one time was an education minister in the Kenyan government, used to tell a story of a long-forgotten crisis when…