In my post from last week about central banks I argued that they are devaluing their currencies in a zero-sum game for stimulating their domestic economies at the expense of their trade partners. A recent piece by Jonathan Laing in Barron’s echoes some of the same points. Laing cites ...
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One of the first things that you learn about economic growth, if you learn anything at all, is that growth is not a zero-sum game. That is, when a company like Apple increases its earnings by 40% or so, as it did last quarter, it didn’t simply “take” those earnings from its ...
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The prices for bonds move inversely to the interest that they pay to investors. When bonds are in high demand, prices increase and bond yields decrease. Probably the biggest financial story for 2014 thus far is the unexpected demand for bonds. If you were wondering just how strong the ...
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One intended goal of the federal reserve’s bond buying is to induce a “wealth effect” in homeowners by inflating the perceived value of their home. By artificially suppressing mortgage rates, houses become easier to buy, demand for houses increases accordingly, and prices go ...
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In the Wall Street Journal today economist Allan H. Meltzer argues that as a consequence of the Federal Reserve’s easy money policies, “Inflation is in our future. Food prices are leading off, as they did in the mid-1960s before the ‘stagflation’ of the 1970s. Other ...
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