ShareBack in July, Ed pointed to some comments by George Soros on currencies that I felt were perceptive. Soros said:
The dollar is a very weak currency except all the others.

With most major currencies down significantly against the dollar, we now see the truth in that statement. I want to add some color and connect this [...]

As we discuss sovereign debt levels, currencies and competitiveness, it bears remembering that interest rates are at the heart of many of these debates. To the degree debt service costs are the only measure used to determine how high a debt burden is, you are going to run into problems with low interest rates. The lower the rate of interest, the higher the debt load a given repayment schedule can service. Focussing only on debt service costs is clearly bubble mentality that led to huge credit growth in the household sector in the past decade. If this same mentality creeps into the debate on public sector debt burdens, expect the same results.

ShareThis 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 [...]

ShareSteve 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 [...]

ShareMorgan 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 [...]

ShareWolfgang 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 [...]

ShareEarlier 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 [...]

ShareBelow 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 [...]

ShareLast week, I highlighted some of the ideas of Australian economist Steve Keen in my post, “Steve Keen and the spectre of terminal debt.”  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 [...]

ShareThis 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 [...]