…Calmly observing the changing world

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 [...]

I suppose it is a sign of the times that the FDIC’s Failed Bank List was updated with some new features. When I heard that the FDIC closed an astounding seven banks just on Friday, I had to take a closer look, and happily found that the list is now sortable, and has grown so [...]

Today, Mark Buehrle pitched the 18th perfect game in Major League Baseball history. The elusive “perfect game” is every pitcher’s dream, but in a broader context, it is all of our dream to do what we do perfectly. Some of us are even obsessed with it. Dewayne Wise, right before he jumped to save Buehrle’s [...]

Whenever the economy is “bad”, it is always the number one issue: it’s the economy stupid. So somehow, to get Obama’s policies implemented, he will have to couch them in economic terms. That the result becomes completely nonsensical hasn’t seem to have detered him. President Obama’s latest push for health care involves economic arguments in favor [...]

The monetary system of the United States is controlled by the Federal Reserve, which is a private bank whose shareholders are unknown, whose profits are unknown, and whose policies are only deciphered through Congressional hearings – during which representatives of the Federal Reserve speak in FedSpeak, and run intellectual rings around most of the Congressmen, [...]

If you listen closely, you will hear “The New Normal” as the catchphrase of those economists who understand that the “old normal” can never return. This appears at first to be a useful insight, until you realize that by the new normal, these economists mean a quantitatively different normal. That is, it will be a lot [...]