Currently viewing the tag: "Bank of England"

Dear readers, first of all, apologies seem in order. An unusual gap between blog posts has appeared on the Schlichter Files this summer. The reason is that I was travelling with my family in East Africa through most of August, enjoying the spectacular landscapes and the fascinating wildlife there, and meeting some very interesting people. [...]

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On page two of today’s Wall Street Journal Europe you will find the result of a readers’ poll from last Friday: Question: Will the ECB’s rate cut help restore confidence in the bloc’s economy? Answer: 81 percent of readers say no, 19 percent yes. Last week’s round of global monetary easing – another ECB rate [...]

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UK Chancellor George Osborne and Bank of England Governor Mervin King last week announced another round of fiscal and monetary stimulus measures, including steps to ease the funding for banks and allow them to extend more loans. If these measures were hoped to instil confidence they must be classified as a failure. We have lived [...]

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To answer this question is not straightforward. As the gold-sceptics keep reminding us, gold pays no coupon and no dividend, it does not offer a running yield, so traditional measures of ‘fair value’ do not apply. But gold is money, and just as the paper ticket in your wallet does not pay interest, neither does [...]

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Last week, Chatham House, formerly known as the Royal Institute of International Affairs and a non-profit, non-governmental institution in London whose “mission is to be a world-leading source of independent analysis, informed debate and influential ideas on how to build a prosperous and secure world for all”, published a report with the title, “Gold and [...]

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Are you feeling optimistic yet? Are you confident that policy-makers have things under control? – If so, you must believe that we can solve any economic problem by throwing freshly printed money at it. Even problems that are evidently the result of previous periods of ‘easy money’– such as overstretched and weak banks. The ECB [...]

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The Bank of England is expected today to announce another round of debt monetization, called ‘quantitative easing’. A majority of economists polled by Dow Jones Newswire earlier this week expect the central bank’s policy committee to agree “to £50 billion ($79 billion) of additional bond purchases using freshly created money to underpin demand and ensure [...]

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“All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” Benito Mussolini Those who have eyes to see and ears to hear will have noticed the accelerating trend towards interventionist policies and assertive state action all around us. This is not a conspiracy theory circulating on the internet. It is a phenomenon that [...]

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 The pathetic state of the global financial system was again on display this week. Stocks around the world go up when a major central bank pumps money into the financial system. They go down when the flow of money slows and when the intoxicating influence of the latest money injection wears off. Can anybody really [...]

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 Apologies to my readers that no new contributions have appeared on the Schlichter Files for two weeks, and in particular that I did not get around to responding to some of the questions and comments on my blog.  I hope to rectify this shortly. I was committed to a few speaking engagements in connection with [...]

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