Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Currency is Equity, Equity is Currency

This is utterly brilliant: Twitter / izakaminska: Why equity is a type of privately issued currency Steve Randy Waldman has been here before, with the idea that currency issued by government (ultimately through deficit spending) is “equity” in government, or in America. But this reverses it beautifully, with the notion that private equity issuance is […]

Do Savers “Take Resources out of Society”?

Revisiting a previous post, “Saving” ≠ “Saving Resources”*, wherein I question Scott Sumner’s notion that people who spend and consume more (save less) take resources “out of society.” Try this: John works for Debbie, and Debbie works for John. They each start out with $100 in dollar bills, $200 total. They pay each other in […]

Debt and Growth III

I’m going to try to make this post brief and comprehensible.  It contains no information not in an earlier post but I delete a whole lot of distracting data. The question is does the Reinhart Rogoff (hence R-R) data set on public debt and real GDP in 20 rich countries post WWII contain evidence that a […]

All Currency is “Fiat” Currency

Or to be more precise, all currency is consensus currency. Units of exchange (dollar bills, great big rocks at the bottom of the ocean) can have value merely because everyone in a community agrees that they have value. That value need not be declared, defined, or enforced by by some “fiat” authority with powers of (ultimately […]

German tax enforcement paying dividends

I have long advocated that the United States should follow Germany’s example of aggressive pursuit of tax evasion, in particular its practice of paying informants for account information from secrecy destinations like Liechtenstein and Switzerland. The German Parliament’s upper house (Bundesrat) rejected a deal in November that Prime Minister Angela Merkel was willing to sign […]

Defining Rich VII: Explaining Income inequality in pictures

I had my hair cut last week.  It’s a big event as it happens about twice per year.  While there I always get into political conversations with the lady cutting my hair.  This time, as often it was the economy.  Her position still is that the individual citizens collecting welfare are effecting her income.  We’ve […]

World Industrial Production

I see some evidence that higher domestic energy production and improved competitiveness of US manufacturing is having a positive impact on the US trade balance and US industrial production. But I still expects the impact to be limited. In particular, the real non-petroleum trade balance continues to deteriorate. Increased supplies of cheap natural gas helps […]

Oh hail the Great Cactus

Looking for some back articles and wanting to try out posting with our new setup I found this one by Mike Kimel (formally known as Cactus) from July, 2010.   It is always fun to look back.* He presents his data and argument regarding where we’re going and concludes: This time, I’m not as comfortable; given where and how […]