This is a post I just wrote over at Yves Smith’s site Naked Capitalism in response to a reader request. Marshall Auerback has already written a reply as well and I will post this later today.
A reader at Naked Capitalism asked us to respond to a recent article from the Christian Science Monitor asking Does [...]

Steve Horwitz had an interesting read last week on Friedrich von Hayek, the Nobel Prize winning Austrian School economist. Von Hayek is best known for his 1944 Libertarian call to arms “Road to Serfdom” and is generally considered one of the fathers of the free market ideology.
In Horwitz’s piece, he points out that Hayek was [...]

Morgan Stanley has an interesting piece out this morning called Debtflation. In the past, they have raised alarm bells over what they see as embedded inflation in the loose monetary policy presently being followed by most central banks.  This particular piece focuses not on a general potential for inflation, but the possibility that central banks [...]

Wolfgang Munchau of the Financial Times wrote a very important comment piece in today’s Financial Times. In it he said that central banks are targeting asset prices to avoid the brunt of cyclical downturns. This policy is inducing asset bubbles and creating a more volatile real economy with unpredictable negative consequences.
I want to expand [...]

Earlier today I wrote a post featuring comments by Marc Faber as I like to do from time to time.  In this particular case Dr. Faber was waxing prosaically about an eventual bankruptcy of the U.S. government.  His money quote was:
“Next station is when the U.S. government goes bust.”

I love this guy. Quite frankly, the [...]

Below are two videos from Marc Faber’s recent interview on Asia Confidential.  In it, he takes questions from user emails in regards to the U.S. dollar, economic decline in the U.S. and gold as an investment.
He sees a need for the U.S. to borrow increasing amounts of money going forward – not less. As a [...]

Last week, I highlighted some of the ideas of Australian economist Steve Keen in my post, “Politics and reform: Say I’m a politician….”  Keen is of the Minsky camp and he believes that an unsustainable debt bubble has build up in the industrialized world which can only be brought to heel through a ‘debt jubilee.’
Below [...]

This entry from Gary Shilling comes via John Mauldin’s site InvestorInsight.com where he highlights commentary from some of the best economic thinkers. Shilling, who correctly predicted problems in residential real estate in the US, is in the deflation camp.  He thinks the US will be a slow growing economy prone to recession and high unemployment [...]

The list of countries with deflation is growing by the month.  We have Spain, Switzerland, Britain, Ireland.  Now add Germany.
German consumer prices fell for the first time in 22 years in July, official figures have shown.
Prices fell 0.6% in July from a year earlier – the first fall since March 1987, when they declined by [...]

In talking to the FT’s Gillian Tett, Hugh Hendry of The Eclectica Fund makes the hilarious metaphor of China as Santa Claus bringing gifts to a world constrained by excessive Western government debt issuance.  But, Hendry thinks the Asian surplus countries are the most exposed and most vulnerable because they are excessively dependent on foreign [...]