We all know that the Fed printed $3.7 trillion of new money between 2008 and 2014 under the banner of “quantitative easing,” or “QE,” as part of a failed monetary experiment by former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. The Fed also held interest rates at zero for seven years from 2008 to 2015 to subsidize bank
For months, I have listened to Wall Street analysts and the business media claim that the new U.S.-China trade war is a nonevent. They claim that Trump is not serious about seeing through on his threatened tariffs on China. They also claim that China is just posturing in its retaliation. The expectation is that once
We all know how the mainstream media treat Donald Trump. The coverage from The Washington Post, The New York Times, NBC and other outlets is relentlessly and exclusively negative. Trump gets no credit for reducing unemployment, cutting taxes, boosting growth, achieving a breakthrough with North Korea, defeating ISIS and standing up to the dictators in
For months, the world has been witness to the ascendancy of Xi Jinping. He’s the president of China, general secretary of the Communist Party, head of the Politburo and head of the Chinese military. Recent party congresses have gone even further and enshrined Xi’s writings on a par with Mao Zedong and removed term limits
Many of those who warn of near-term economic collapses or market panics are consigned to the fringes of economic analysis. The mainstream analysts at university faculties or Wall Street banks are almost unanimous in saying, “All is well.” Most predict years of strong growth ahead, higher stock prices and higher interest rates. Of course, these
Free riding is one of the oldest problems in economics and in society in general. Simply put, free riding describes a situation where one party takes the benefits of an economic condition without contributing anything to sustain that condition. The best example is a parasite on an elephant. The parasite sucks the elephant’s blood to
The author of “The Dao of Capital”, Mark Spitznagel, speaks about the negative impact of interest rate manipulations by central banks. Mark Spitznagel, Universa Investments LP founder, discusses the lessons learned from the 2008 financial crisis. He speaks with Bloomberg’s Erik Schatzker. (Source: Bloomberg). Click here for the video.
If you’ve ever lived through a life-threatening emergency — whether a car crash, train wreck or a steep fall (hopefully not) — you have noticed that time seems to slow down. You witness your personal jeopardy in slow motion. A memorable example of this is the film The Matrix, in which the hero, Neo, could dodge
Current Fed policy will push the U.S. economy to the brink of recession, possibly by later this year. When that happens, the Fed will have to reverse course and ease monetary policy. Meanwhile, the economic cheerleaders recite recent GDP figures and the stimulative effects of the Trump tax cuts. For more of this article, click
The trade war between the U.S. and China is headline news on every channel. Despite glossy analyses by the mainstream financial media, this trade war is just getting started and should be expected to get much worse before it gets better. Reports that Trump’s tariffs are just for show and China’s response is just posturing
