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The human brain excels at taking shortcuts. Processing all the information our senses collect takes a lot of energy, so repetitive data gets lower priority. Things we see often fade into the background so we can notice new stuff. This is where we get phenomena like “nose blindness.” We stop...
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I generally send out two letters a week. The letter that arrives in your inbox over the weekend is Thoughts from the Frontline and is written by me. The second letter, which is called Outside the Box, generally comes in the middle of the week and is an article or essay written by someone else that I...
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Definitions of Inflation and Deflation Measuring Inflation/Deflation Asset Inflation Versus Price Inflation So Who’s Afraid of Deflation? And Then There Is Debt Deflation The Last Argument of Central Banks New York and New Technology For a central banker, deflation is one of the Four Horsemen of...
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A note has been circulating among economists, calling into question the wisdom of another group of economists who wrote an open letter to the Federal Reserve a few years ago suggesting that one of the risks of their quantitative easing program was increased inflation. Since we have not seen CPI inflation...
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My good friend Dylan Grice takes a very interesting tack in the latest issue of his Edelweiss Journal , today's Outside the Box. Rather than attacking our macroeconomic problems directly with economic tools, he approaches them from the point of view of what he calls a "subtle but significant...
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A Temporary Problem Any Bonds Today? Newport, NYC, Maine, and Montana By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method, they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the...
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In today’s Outside the Box, Gary D. Halbert (my old and very dear friend and former business partner of many years) reminds us about a few significant facts concerning the Consumer Price Index (CPI) that mainstream economists and the media tend to ignore. The central question is whether the CPI...
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Argentina: A Lesson in Chaos Argentina on Sale Why Don't You Just Stop? Can the US Experience Argentinean Inflation? Webinar The Andes, Sonoma, Manila, and Singapore When I was younger, so much younger than today, I never needed anybody's help in any way. But now these days are gone, I'm...
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5.5% Unemployment Is Acceptable We Live in Uncertain Times With Apologies to Drunken Sailors What If They Gave a QE Party and No One Came? The Magnitude of the Mess We’re In Atlanta, New York, Orlando, and South America There is an intense debate going on in the first-class cabin of Economics Airlines...
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US Unemployment Turns Back South A Synchronized Global Slowdown Why Would You Buy a Bond with Negative Interest? First Deflation, Then Inflation New York, Madrid, Tuscany, and Singapore A New Adventure And Bad Dad One of the more frequent questions I am asked in meetings or after a speech is whether...
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It was Gary Shilling – way back in the last century – who first woke me up to the real whys and wherefores of deflation, with his 1998 best-seller, Deflation: Why it's coming, whether it's good or bad, and how it will affect your investments, business, and personal affairs. I had...
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Is It Time to Buy a House? Time to Get Outraged by the Banks We Need a Mulligan A Congressional Investigation Is Needed How We Get Out of This 20 Policies to Implement to Create Jobs Tuscany, Kiev, Geneva, and London This week we look at data from the Bank of International Settlements, by which (if someone...
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In This Issue: What the CBO Assumes Scylla and Charybdis – The Federal Reserve and the FDIC La Jolla, Toronto, and Cleveland Albert Einstein is famously quoted as saying, “Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world.” And compounding is indeed the topic of this week’s...
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In This Issue: The Cure for High Prices Let’s Rewind the Inflation Tape A Shocking Development Another Important European Election Home Again, a “Sports” Injury, and My Conference Today we once again think about the inflation/deflation debate, turn our eyes to Europe and the very interesting...
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In This Issue: The Curve in the Road Capacity Utilization Is Rising Inflation Expectations The Transmission Mechanism Portland, New York, and Home for a Few Weeks TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could...