…Calmly observing the changing world

Money, it seems, is a curious thing. Throughout human history, people have organized for themselves various methods and items through which they can exchange goods and store wealth. If we were to examine the historical development of what we conceive of as money, we would find that one of the properties that money tends to [...]

On Friday, four more banks failed. Two of them, unsurprisingly, were in troubled Georgia. We all know that these banks were “FDIC insured”, but how does that insurance actually work… and just who are these FDIC people? The C in FDIC stands for corporation. Like the Federal Reserve, the FDIC is actually a corporation, but [...]

Several companies have been flooding the markets with specialty ETFs, and this has resulted in an explosion of investments that were previously unavailable to most investors. If you want to invest in natural gas, just buy UNG. Biotechnology companies? Try IBB, and so on. But as these ETF-offering companies have saturated the most obvious investments, [...]

(Corrected) Occasionally I have called the European Central Bank “Germany’s Central Bank” in a tongue-and-cheek fashion, hoping to spread awareness that the second is more accurate that the first. The ECB is, without a doubt, a thoroughly German institution, and the German bankers would never have turned over their currency destiny to Europe as a [...]

It seems that if you are an economist, you can contort your mind into believing that spending causes wealth. Once you have accomplished this task, everything else seems to flow fairly easily. Pretty soon, you start to believe that governments should increase spending during recessions to boost the economy, and maybe eventually that we can [...]

The global economic crisis affects every country in slightly different ways. For Iceland, it meant a currency collapse, which is perhaps preferable to the non-currency collapse of Ireland, whose Euro-strangled economy is truly on the brink (Telegraph). But what about those countries that are already poor? Do they have even farther to fall, or will [...]