financial history

You've heard me throw the 'D' word around on a couple of occasions - sometimes to signal policy makers are trying to avoid that outcome, but other times to signal this is looking like one. So, which is it? We don't know yet. But let me use…

There is a notable lack of long-run analyses of monetary systems and their stability. This column addresses this gap by looking at the monetary systems of major European states between 1300 and 1914. The evidence collected suggests that,…

As I see it, Japan’s problem was that during the 1980s it was so addicted to investment-led growth and artificially cheap financing that it misallocated capital on a massive scale and failed to include the resulting implicit losses in its…

When oil prices start to decline, investors and economists get worried. Oil prices in large part reflect global sentiment towards our economic future - prosperous, growing economies need more oil while slumping, shrinking economies need…

This is a brief follow-up to my post yesterday proclaiming that this is looking more like Hoover every day. Credit Writedowns reader Greg came across the statement below. Who said it, Herbert Hoover or Barack Obama?

PIMCO, the world’ largest bond fund call this suppression of yields financial repression because it means savers and bond investors get negative real returns. However, John Hempton pointed out that in Japan, where this monetary policy is…

Andy Lees takes a sceptical view of fiat currency and the excess credit it has created over the past forty years and uses a few charts to demonstrate his points.

Richard Nixon unilaterally closed the gold window 40 years ago today. No longer would the U.S. permit other countries to exchange their dollars for gold and by breaking that link, he ended the Bretton Woods international financial regime…

The classification of assets according to such dreary concoctions as "mid-cap growth," comparative asset benchmarks is now over.