Basic Reports

When Is a Capital Gain Capital Consumption? Market Report, 25 May

The price of gold dropped a few bucks this week, but the price of silver jumped about half a buck. The drumbeat for the gold bull market is well underway, and it is beginning now for silver. So let’s do a quick update on the supply and demand fundamentals. Here is the graph of the […]

Crude Goes Negative!

In mainstream economic thought, there is one primary way that the economy can go screwy. Prices can rise too fast, and this is called bad inflation. This is to be contrasted with good inflation, when prices are rising at the Goldilocks-just-right rate. Diehard Keynesians (and monetarists) do fret about falling prices. But as Ben Bernanke’s […]

Socialism and Gold

Socialism and Gold Most people assume that the central bank prints money when it buys bonds. They further assume that this increase in the quantity of money causes an increase in the general price level. And, this leads them to assume that the value of the money is 1 / P (P is the general […]

Money and Prices Are a Dynamic System, Report 1 Dec

The basic idea behind the Quantity Theory of Money could be stated as: too much money supply is chasing too little goods supply, so prices rise. We have debunked this from several angles. For example, we can use a technique that every first year student in physics is expected to know. Dimensional analysis looks at […]

Wealth Accumulation Is Becoming Impossible, Report 20 Oct

We talk a lot about the falling interest rate, the too-low interest rate, the near-zero interest rate, the zero interest rate, and the negative interest rate. Hat Tip to Switzerland, where Credit Suisse is now going to pay depositors -0.85%. That is, if you lend your francs to this bank, they take some of them […]

A Wealth Tax Consumes Capital, Report 6 Oct

It seems one cannot make a name for one’s self on the Left, unless one has a proposal to tax wealth. Academics like Tomas Piketty have proposed it. And now the Democratic candidates for president in the US propose it too, while Jeremy Corbyn proposes it in the UK. Venezuela finally added a wealth tax […]

Dollar Supply Creates Dollar Demand, Report 2 June

We have been discussing the impossibility of China nuking the Treasury bond market. We covered a list of challenges China would face. Then last week we showed that there cannot be such a thing as a bond vigilante in an irredeemable currency. Now we want to explore a different path to the same conclusion that […]

The Monetary Cause of Lower Prices, Report 12 May

We have deviated, these past several weeks, from matters monetary. We have written a lot about a nonmonetary driver of higher prices—mandatory useless ingredients. The government forces businesses to put ingredients into their products that consumers don’t know about, and don’t want. These useless ingredients, such as ADA-compliant bathrooms and supply chain tracking, add a […]

Keynes Was a Vicious Bastard, Report 17 Mar

My goal is to make you mad. Not at me (though I expect to ruffle a few feathers with this one). At the evil being wrought in the name of fighting inflation and maximizing employment. And at the aggressive indifference to this evil, exhibited by the capitalists, the gold bugs, and the otherwise-free-marketers. So, today […]

Rising Rates Falling Assets, Report 30 Dec 2018

Last week, we wrote about the concept of discounting. This is how to assess the value of any asset that generates cash flow. You calculate a present value by discounting earnings for each future year. And the discount rate is the market interest rate. We said: “If the Fed can manipulate the rate of interest, […]