…Calmly observing the changing world

In a surprise move today, the Federal Reserve raised the somewhat low-profile discount rate from 0.50% to 0.75%. Supposedly, they are backing away from “emergency” operations and things are slowly getting back to “normal”. In the great scheme of things, this doesn’t sound like much, but rate cycles are long term events and while we [...]

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 [...]

In a wild and crazy financial story (no… really!), two Japanese citizens were caught by Italian border patrol agents while on a train at Chiasso headed to Switzerland with an unusual amount of foreign bonds. To be clear, by “foreign bonds” in this case I mean American. And by “an unusual amount”, I mean $134,500,000,000 [...]

Shakespeare warns us, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be”, which seems like good advice. Sadly, like a lot of other good advice, it suffers from difficulties during implementation. It seems we’ve borrowed – quite a bit.  Even those who haven’t personally borrowed or lent are still under the collective borrowing of our country. Worse [...]

While very few people seem to know what is really going on, everyone seems to have figured out by now that whatever it is, it’s getting worse. But if you think Americans are worried, just imagine how the people who lend us money feel. Well, the Japanese, long time major creditors of the United States, [...]

If you were going to guess which country would be the first to succumb to the financial collapse, you probably wouldn’t have come up with Iceland, even though the island nation has been battling a currency crisis since the Spring. After all, Iceland has no real national debt to speak of, and significant low cost [...]