After the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989 and the death of the Soviet Union was confirmed two years later as Boris Yeltsin courageously stood down the Red Army tanks in front of Moscow’s White House, a dark era in human history came to an abrupt end. The world had descended into a “77-Years’

  The October personal savings rate at 2.3% was the second lowest ever recorded and barely one-fifth of the standard 10%+ rate that prevailed during the heyday of US prosperity prior to 1980. It would be stating the obvious, therefore, to say that Americans are living paycheck to paycheck and that the growth of savings […]

  Andrew Mellon got it right 90 years ago when he told Hoover: … liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate. Purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down… enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people. Actually, the rot […]

  … at least in the UK. The reason for this radical overnight pivot is truly pathetic. The arrogant mandarins who run the BOE (Bank of England) deemed the bond market’s extremely negative reaction to the Truss government’s plan to drown the nation in public debt to be “dysfunctional.” The rise of 30-year bond yields […]

  There is absolutely no precedent or logic for inflation to subside toward the Fed’s sacred 2.00% target until interest rates exceed the running year-over-year (Y/Y) inflation rate by a substantial margin. As a reminder, here is the path of the inflation-adjusted Fed funds rate when Paul Volcker wrestled inflation to the ground in 1979–1986. […]

  The Fed is barely on the cusp of allowing interest rates to rise in the direction of normality, but these folks are already pricing in the next round of rate cuts beginning next spring. For that reason, the forward funds rate via the overnight index swaps market is forecast to essentially rise by another […]

  We have been in a world of systematically increasing leverage and borrowed prosperity owing to the central bankers’ false predicate that “administered” interest rates, rather than free market prices for money and credit, are the preferred route to growth and rising living standards. This is the great economic error of the past several decades. […]

  There is a virulent food, energy and commodities inflation worldwide and there is no end in sight. So what counts is the total cost of living index, not one that excludes what is now approaching $5 per gallon gasoline and the highest grocery inflation in a generation. The February to April postings for the […]

  The 10-year US Treasury bond (UST) yield crossed the 3% mark recently. So you’d think this was a sign that a modicum of rationality is returning to the bond bits. But not really. That’s because inflation is rising even faster than interest rates, meaning that real yields on the fulcrum security for the entire […]

  The impending Fed brakes slamming operation will send the US economy careening into the next recession. What is ignored, however, is that we are already almost there. Throw in near double-digit inflation, an impending panicked move toward more stringent tightening by the Fed and a likely Wall Street crash into the brew over the […]

  (Wag the Dog is a comedy film from the ’90s whose main plot is that the president of the US is confronted with a major scandal and decides to manufacture a war in Albania he can heroically end and thus cover the scandal.) Are you wondering how Washington got itself to the brink of […]

  My, how the frog does boil! Recently, the national debt (aka public debt) crossed the $30 trillion milestone, yet neither Wall Street nor Washington took note. But it did catch our attention and we want to recall why a young budget director was thumping on the Gipper’s chest in the Oval Office photo below. […]

It’s long past time for conservative folks to wake up. Today’s great threat to capitalist prosperity, personal liberty and constitutional government as we have known it is not Marxism, socialism or any other variant of traditional left-wing ideology. The real threat to liberty is more generic. Rather than a specific history-rooted ideology, such as the […]

What’s wrong with these people? We are referring to NATO Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, who recently informed the Kremlin that what happens on Russia’s border is none of Russia’s damn business: It’s only Ukraine and 30 NATO allies that decide when Ukraine is ready to join NATO… Russia has no veto, Russia has no say, […]