Category Archive: 6b.) Bawerk

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USD ready for a second leg higher – then what?

2016-10-17

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2016-10-17

One year ago we showed the following chart to explain the relative strong dollar that was on everyone’s mind at the time. With a second leg higher in the US dollar imminent, this particular chart will be more important than ever. Claims to dollars, such as demand and time deposits, or even more opaque money-like products created by the shadow banking system is just that, a claim or derivative on the final mean of payment, namely base money.

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Do our money managers really believe this will end well?

2016-10-09

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2016-10-09

An economic bubble is essentially an economic activity that cannot sustain itself without a continuous influx of new money and credit to bid away real resources from self-funding endeavors. Financial bubbles are obviously closely related as financial...

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The Road to Fascism in Just Two Charts

2016-09-19

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2016-09-19

Laws of politics have been turned upside down. The Intellectuals Yet Idiots can make no sense of it. The underdog who ‘tell it how it is’ appeal to people while established reasoning does not.

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Labour Productivity, Taxes and Okun’s Law

2016-09-04

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2016-09-04

The great “science” of economics once discovered an empirical relationship between GDP and unemployment that has been dubbed Okun’s Law. It simply states that the unemployment rate rises as GDP contracts, or vice versa, as production shrinks less peo...

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Mission Creep – How the Fed will justify maintaining its excessive balance sheet

2016-08-30

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2016-08-30

FOMC have changed their normalizing strategy several times and we now see the contours of yet another shift. The Federal Reserve was supposed to reduce its elevated balance sheet before moving interest higher as it would be impossible to increase the fed funds rate in the old fashioned way when the market was saturated with trillions of dollars in excess reserves.

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The Dos Santos Succession Saga

2016-08-21

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2016-08-21

Arguably one of the easier calls for us to make after 37 years in power was that President dos Santos would find ways of affording himself another 5 years in. Like any ‘effective’ leader, Mr. Santos made sure the final deal to do just that was stitched up long before the Party Congress formally convenes in Luanda, with a lower level MPLA ‘Central Committee’ already rubber stamping his name in mid-August.

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Norway: Towards Stagflation

2016-08-19

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2016-08-19

We have all heard the incredible stories of housing riches in commodity producing hotspots such as Western Australia and Canada. People have become millionaires simply by leveraging up and holding on to properties. These are the beneficiaries of a global money-printing spree that pre-dates the financial crisis by decades.

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Stupid is What Stupid Does – Secular Stagnation Redux

2016-08-17

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2016-08-17

Which country, the United States or Japan, have had the fastest GDP growth rate since the financial crisis? Due to Japan’s bad reputation as a stagnant, debt ridden, central bank dependent, demographic basket case the question appears superfluous. The answer seemed so obvious to us that we haven’t really bothered looking into it until one day we started thinking about the demographic situation in the two countries.

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The FOMC Butterfly that Will Ruin the World

2016-07-30

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2016-07-30

Given the fact that the core CPI is currently over the arbitrarily set 2 per cent target unemployment below what the FOMC regards as full employment and GDP running at a rate far above the Federal Reserve’s own estimates of so-called potential; you would say the Federal Funds rate would be in the vicinity of five per cent.

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Brexit or not, the pound will crash

2016-07-16

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2016-07-16

Status quo, as our generation know it, established in 1945 has plodded along ever since. It is true that it have had near death experiences several times, especially in August 1971 when the world almost lost faith in the global reserve currency and in 2008 when the fractional reserve Ponzi nearly consumed itself. While the recent Brexit vote seem to be just another near death experience.

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Money confuses and blurs economic relations

2016-06-30

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2016-06-30

Money, generally accepted medium of exchange, acts as a veil that confuse and blurs economic relations. This is especially true when it comes to intertemporal considerations. Whilst probably the most important institution in a free market, money can be highly destructive when politicized.

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South China Sea: Storm in an Indian Ocean Teacup

2016-06-27

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2016-06-27

With global attention focused on BREXIT calamity, potentially more important questions are being overlooked, and especially in the South China Sea where storms are currently brewing between China and a range of littoral states for strategic control of territorial waters.

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China the lender of last resort for many oil producers

2016-06-21

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2016-06-21

Bawerk explains how China will be the lender of last resort of many oil producers. China might let collapse a smaller producer and become much smarter at covering its political bases across producer states to protect longer term sunk costs.

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Dumbest monetary experimental end game in history (including Havenstein and Gono’s)

2016-06-18

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2016-06-18

The Greatest Keynesian monetary experiment is not sustainable. It will not continue ad infinitum. Our money masters are just postponing the inevitable bust that will eventually correct these imbalances through worldwide capital re-allocation. Bawerk shows 3 graphs how investment growth gets slower and slower since the End of Bretton, how debt is increasing and how cheap dollar fuel debt-driven growth.

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Saudi-Arabia: Peg or Banking Crisis?

2016-06-04

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2016-06-04

During the reign of the mighty petro-dollar standard, it was necessary for major oil exporters to recycle their dollar holdings back into the dollar-based financial system to maintain their self-imposed exchange rate pegs. US government bonds are the...

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OPEC’s Game within a Game

2016-06-02

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2016-06-02

The fact OPEC just agreed to agree on nothing in Vienna. What next? Lots of noise about collective output vs. country allocations.

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Notes from ECB Press Conference

2016-06-02

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2016-06-02

ECB press conference June 2 2016 Q; Risk to inflation balanced? April meeting, no conclusive evidence of second round effects, are they now? A; Additional stimulus beyond CSPP and TLTRO2 not necessary as we expect higher inflation. We do not see evid...

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Academic Skulduggery – How Ivory Tower Hubris Wrecks your Life

2016-05-23

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2016-05-23

In the 1970s economists started to incorporate rational expectations into their models and not long after the seminal Kydand & Prescott (1977) article named Rules Rather than Discretion: The Inconsistency of Optimal Plan was published. Their work has...

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Fed Suppression, Long Term Economic Repression

2016-05-19

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2016-05-19

The Federal Reserve really wants to raise rates, but they do not dare as the consequence of interrupting an unprecedented level of capital misallocation is too grave to face head on. So our money masters continue their low interest rate policy; pulli...

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OPEC Politics: Russian King, Iranian Crown Prince?

2016-05-12

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2016-05-12

Another month, another OPEC meeting beckons for 2nd June. But unlike typical meetings on the Danube (let alone dust filled haze of Doha), the producer group might just have a new King in town.

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