Tag Archive: On Economy

Lessons from Squanto

2017-11-26

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2017-11-26

Crime
Governments across the planet will go to any length to meddle in the lives and private affairs of their citizens. This is what our experiences and observations have shown. What gives? For one, politicians have an aversion to freedom and liberty. They want to control your behavior, choices, and decisions. What’s more, they want to use your money to do so.

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The Precious Metals Bears’ Fear of Fridays

2017-11-24

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2017-11-24

Die Angst
In the last issue of Seasonal Insights I have shown that the gold price behaves quite peculiarly in the course of the trading week. On average, prices rise almost exclusively on Friday. It is as though investors in this market were mired in deep sleep for most of the week.

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How Uncle Sam Inflates Away Your Life

2017-11-23

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2017-11-23

Inflation
“Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon,” economist and Nobel Prize recipient Milton Friedman once remarked. He likely meant that inflation is the more rapid increase in the supply of money relative to the output of goods and services which money is traded for.

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Business Cycles and Inflation – Part I

2017-11-18

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2017-11-18

Incrementum Advisory Board Meeting Q4 2017 – Special Guest Ben Hunt, Author and Editor of Epsilon Theory. The quarterly meeting of the Incrementum Fund’s Advisory Board took place on October 10 and we had the great pleasure to be joined by special guest Ben Hunt this time, who is probably known to many of our readers as the main author and editor of Epsilon Theory.

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What President Trump and the West Can Learn from China

2017-11-16

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2017-11-16

President Trump meets President Xi
Expensive Politics. Instead of a demonstration of its overwhelming military might intended to intimidate tiny North Korea and pressure China to lean on its defiant communist neighbor, President Trump and the West should try to learn a few things from China.

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Heat Death of the Economic Universe

2017-11-12

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2017-11-12

Physicists say that the universe is expanding. However, they hotly debate (OK, pun intended as a foreshadowing device) if the rate of expansion is sufficient to overcome gravity—called escape velocity. It may seem like an arcane topic, but the consequences are dire either way.

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The Downright Sinister Rearrangement of Riches

2017-11-11

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2017-11-11

Clinton
Simple Classifications. Let’s begin with facts. Cold hard unadorned facts. Water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit at standard atmospheric pressure. Squaring the circle using a compass and straightedge is impossible. The sun is a star.

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How to Survive the Winter

2017-11-07

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2017-11-07

The Elbonian investigation
One of the fringe benefits of living in a country that’s in dire need of a political, financial, and cultural reset, is the twisted amusement that comes with bearing witness to its unraveling. Day by day we’re greeted with escalating madness. Indeed, the great fiasco must be taken lightly, so as not to be demoralized by its enormity.

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Falling Interest Rates

2017-10-27

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2017-10-27

US 10 Year Treasury Yield, Jan 1981 - 2017
Amassing Unproductive Debt.Last week, we discussed the marginal productivity of debt. This is how much each newly-borrowed dollar adds to GDP. And ever since the interest rate began its falling trend in 1981, marginal productivity of debt has tightly correlated with interest. The lower the interest rate, the less productive additional borrowing has in fact become.

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Marc Faber, Freedom of Speech & Capitalism

2017-10-27

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2017-10-27

Political Correctness Hampers Honest Debate. What would the world be like today had Europeans never colonized Americas, Africa, the Middle East, Australia, New Zealand, and South Asia? Most of these societies would still not have discovered the wheel. It takes a huge amount of reality-avoidance and ineptitude for outsiders who travel there not to realize that a billion or more people in the Third World still wouldn’t have discovered the wheel.

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Can Switzerland Save the World?

2017-10-26

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2017-10-26

Mountain
Switzerland: Far from Flawless, but still a Unique Country – An Interview with Claudio Grass. Our friend Claudio Grass has discussed Switzerland in these pages before, and on one of these occasions we added some background information on country’s truly unique political system (see “The People Against the Establishment” for the details).

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The Falling Productivity of Debt

2017-10-20

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2017-10-20

Marginal Debt Productivity, Jan 1953 - 2017
Discounting the Present Value of Future Income. Last week, we discussed the ongoing fall of dividend, and especially earnings, yields. This Report is not a stock letter, and we make no stock market predictions. We talk about this phenomenon to make a different point. The discount rate has fallen to a very low level indeed.

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The Donald Can’t Stop It

2017-10-15

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2017-10-15

Margin Adjusted Cape, 1928 - 2016
The Dow’s march onward and upward toward 30,000 continues without a pause. New all-time highs are notched practically every day. Despite Thursday’s 31-point pullback, the Dow is up over 15.5 percent year-to-date. What a remarkable time to be alive. President Donald Trump is pumped! As Commander in Chief, he believes he possesses divine powers. He can will the stock market higher – and he knows it.

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1987, 1997, 2007… Just How Crash-Prone are Years Ending in 7?

2017-10-12

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2017-10-12

Dow Jones 10 Year Cycle, 1987 - 2015
Bad Reputation. Years ending in 7, such as the current year 2017, have a bad reputation among stock market participants. Large price declines tend to occur quite frequently in these years. Just think of 1987, the year in which the largest one-day decline in the US stock market in history took place: the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged by 22.61 percent in a single trading day. Or recall the year 2007, which marked the beginning of the GFC...

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Donald Trump: Warmonger-in-Chief

2017-10-11

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2017-10-11

Armchair General
If a world conflagration, God forbid, should break out during the Trump Administration, its genesis will not be too hard to discover: the thin-skinned, immature, shallow, doofus who currently resides in the Oval Office! This past week, the Donald has continued his bellicose talk with both veiled and explicit threats against purported American adversaries throughout the world.

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India: The Genie of Lawlessness is out of the Bottle

2017-09-24

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2017-09-24

People
Recapitulation (Part XVI, the Last). Since the announcement of demonetization of Indian currency on 8th November 2016, I have written a large number of articles. The issue is not so much that the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, is a tyrant and extremely simplistic in his thinking (which he is), or that demonetization and the new sales tax system were horribly ill-conceived (which they were). Time erases all tyrants from the map, and...

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US Debt: To Hell In A Bucket

2017-09-20

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2017-09-20

No-one Cares. “No one really cares about the U.S. federal debt,” remarked a colleague and Economic Prism reader earlier in the week.  “You keep writing about it as if anyone gives a lick.” We could tell he was just warming up.  So, we settled back into our chair and made ourselves comfortable.

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The Government Debt Paradox: Pick Your Poison

2017-09-12

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2017-09-12

Rahm Emanuel
“Rule one: Never allow a crisis to go to waste,” said President Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel in November of 2008.  “They are opportunities to do big things.” At the time of his remark, Emanuel was eager to exploit the 2008 financial crisis to raid the public treasury. With the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in February 2009, Emanuel’s wish was granted.

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How to Make the Financial System Radically Safer

2017-09-07

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2017-09-07

Mouse traps
Clear thinking and discerning rigor when it comes to the twisted state of present economic policy matters brings with it many physical ailments. A permanent state of disbelief, for instance, manifests in dry eyes and droopy shoulders. So, too, a curious skepticism produces etched forehead lines and nighttime bruxism.

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Hidden Forces of Economics

2017-08-31

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2017-08-31

J.M. Keynes
We have noticed a proliferation of pundits, newsletter hawkers, and even mainstream market analysts focusing on one aspect of the bitcoin market. Big money, institutional money, public markets money, is soon to flood into bitcoin. Or so they say.

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