There was a beautiful symmetry to last week’s policy announcement by the Fed. Precisely a week after the ECB had pledged its commitment to unlimited purchases of Euro Zone government bonds, the Fed declared that its new round of debt monetization – ‘quantitative easing’ or QE3 – would be open-ended. Unlimited, open-ended. The concept of [...]
Continue Reading →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. [...]
Continue Reading →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 [...]
Continue Reading →I hate to give personal investment advice. So please do me a favour and do not treat the following as investment advice. I am expressing my personal opinion here. I do so with honesty and conviction, without a personal agenda – I am not trying to sell you anything – but with some good arguments, [...]
Continue Reading →I was thinking of starting this blog with a cynical comment along the lines of, last week equity markets came off, I think we need another €1 trillion from the ECB! – Okay, maybe it wasn’t the greatest joke but you get the idea. But then the Wall Street Journal beat me to it, and [...]
Continue Reading →Greece was bailed out for the second time in four months. Or did it default? Well, a bit of both, I guess. All bondholders are equal. But some are more equal than others. If you are the ECB, your Greek bonds were exchanged, par for par, for new Greek bonds, and you can go on [...]
Continue Reading →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 [...]
Continue Reading →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 [...]
Continue Reading →Jacob Wolinsky of the US website ValueWalk.com conducted an extensive interview with me that covered a wide range of topics, from my own background and the appeal of Austrian School Economics to what I think Obama and Bernanke should do. You can read it here or here.
Continue Reading →As you know, my expectations were low to begin with. I did not expect the EU summit on the debt crisis to provide a solution. There is no solution. The situation is beyond repair and the crisis will continue to unravel. What struck me most when reading the first responses to the EU summit was [...]
Continue Reading →Recent Comments
Roger { Feeding a little conspiracy theory ... considering a four-year schedule, put aside the gold standard... } – Sep 27, 3:20 PM
Detlev Schlichter { Federico, apologies for the slow response. You make a very good point. Banking systems in... } – Sep 27, 3:15 PM
o2flyisfun@gmail.com { Mr Schlichter, excellent article. I agree with previous comments to a great degree as well.... } – Sep 27, 9:16 AM
George { Richard Fisher, President of the Dallas Fed, and a member of the FOMC of the... } – Sep 27, 3:50 AM
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