Our Federal Reserve has reached the point of almost complete dereliction of duty.  With its reckless monetary policy, it has flooded the world with dollars and liquidity, undermined the world’s reserve currency, driven investment off America’s shores, misallocated enormous flows of capital to commodity speculation,  and will ultimately be the leading culprit in defrauding dollar […]

I have been harping on the misguided weak dollar policy of both the Bush and Obama administrations for well over a year, but I was struck by a recent article by David Malpass with this stunning revelation:  “Measured in Euros, U. S. real per capita GDP is down 25% since 2000, while Germany’s is up […]

“Throughout history, what the political class has done is they have turned to the central bank to print their way out of an unfunded liability.  We can’t let that happen.  That’s when you open the floodgates.  So I hope and pray that our political leaders will just have to take this bull by the horns […]

It appears that we have finally reached the tipping point at which commercial banking is headed toward becoming a cost-plus monopoly, with rate-based assets much like a public utility and very close to a nationalized industry.  Maybe not for all institutions, but I can envision a two-tiered system in which the 20 or so “too […]

It is comforting to think that the worst of the economic meltdown may be behind us, that hopefully the extreme volatility of the markets has abated somewhat and they have found their bottom for the time being, but I fear a more profound and longer lasting negative impact from the “cures” that have been applied and […]

The elephant in the living room–the topic Washington won’t broach–is the dollar itself as a powerful but unused monetary policy tool………….probably the most important economic and investing variable in the last decade.  The best stimulus policy is a sound currency.–David Malpass, Chief Economist, Bear Stearns, Wall Street Journal. No less an authority than Lenin well […]

Recently, as the mainstream media pounded away in its coverage of the subprime mortgage “crisis” and the political class scrambled to “do something”, I looked back to the most recent replay of such moments, the 9/11 and Enron scandal induced, pre-tax cut recession of 2001.  At that point, just as Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan rendered his […]

As a former refugee of the commercial banking meltdown of the mid-1980s, I can’t help but hear some echoes of that period in the current fallout from the collapse of the subprime mortgage market bubble. Hopefully, we won’t repeat the mistakes that were made then in adopting the selective bailout procedures, the “too big to […]

More from the “when will we learn” file: Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke recently indicated in Congressional testimony that the Fed won’t be entirely convinced that the risk of inflation is behind us until it sees a rise in unemployment and a reduction in business activity. This kind of commentary, along with business headlines like […]