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The “Stupidity of the Week”-award for the week that I was gone is hereby awarded to the 376 Members of the European Parlament (MEP:s) who thinks that inflation should be fought by replacing the one and two euro coins with bills . Having one bills of roughly the value of one euro have as we all know worked perfectly in the United States. None of

As you may have heard, New York Senator Charles Schumer is on a campaign to slap a 27.5% tariff on all Chinese goods unless they significantly revalue or float the yuan. But he denies being a protectionist. No, you see he merely claims to be opposed to currency manipulation. His threat of tariffs are meant to force the Chinese to end their

I have a article discussing the monetary policy of the ECB on the German web site Der Invest Informant. After the recent small quarter point interest rate hike the ECB was again accused by EU politicians of not inflating enough. But I point out that contrary to the general perception, ECB policy have been highly inflationary and this have caused

With Gold soaring past $530 now , its highest level for a quarter century, some interesting things should be noted. First, this increase have happened during a time when the dollar have risen against other mayor currencies. Usually there is a negative correlation between the dollar price of gold and the exchange value of the dollar versus the euro

Cato Institute senior fellow, Alan Reynolds, who writes pretty good columns on non-monetary issues but who writes terrible columns on monetary issues unfortunately chose to write about monetary issues today , attacking those who “second-guess” the Fed. In a rather typical fashion for his monetary columns, he goes out of his way to mislead people

Read my latest LRC article where I describe why targeting of official consumer price inflation, which is official dogma of most mayor central banks and after Ben Bernanke became Fed Chairman unofficial Fed dogma too, even if desirable (an assumption which can be challenged on many legitimate grounds, but which for now was assumed for the sake of

This weekend marks the one year anniversary of China’s first step away from its more than decade old peg to the U.S. dollar. This meant a small 2.1% revaluation from 8.28 to 8.11 versus the dollar, as well as —they claimed— a move from a pure dollar peg towards a peg to a currency basket, consisting —they claimed— of the U.S. dollar, the euro, the

A few days ago, the Federal Reserve released the latest flow of funds report . It shows in short that the imbalances of the U.S. economy are getting worse than before and that the imbalances were worse before than was previously thought. Household debt for the first quarter were upwardly revised from the $11840.1 billion assumed in the previous

When I surfed into the Yahoo News web site Business section , I saw the headline “Bernanke challenged on inflation”. “About time that happened” was my spontaneous reaction, but of course , when I actually read the article , it instead described a rather absurd discussion between Bernanke and top Democrat Barney Frank, where Frank criticized

In a previous post I discussed how Robert Samuelsson absurdly tried to attribute the tech stock and housing bubbles to lack of inflation rather than existence of inflation. Now he seems to have realized how “excess liquidity” (the source of both the tech stock and housing bubbles) was the result of the policies of the Fed and other central banks.