Currently viewing the tag: "inflation"

I am not holding my breath over the Republicans’ plans for another gold commission to investigate the possibility of returning the USA to a gold standard in the case of the Romney-Ryan ticket winning. Of course, I like the Classical Gold Standard, which existed from about 1880 to 1914, and I am convinced it was [...]

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 Last week, the Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung (DIW), or German Institute for Economic Research, an influential think tank, proposed an ingenious solution to the Euro Zone debt crisis. The German government should issue a Zwangsanleihe, a compulsory bond that every German with savings of €250,000 or more should be compelled to underwrite with 10 percent [...]

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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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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, [...]

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Years ago a friend of mine in New York told me about his massively overweight neighbour who took to wearing a black t-shirt with “I beat anorexia” printed on it. I think that is how our central bankers look at the wonderful job they are doing. Since the last link to gold was severed in [...]

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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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I took the title for this blog from an interview that James Turk of the GoldMoney Foundation conducted with Eric Sprott, a Canadian fund manager. You can see it here. (I also recommend you have a look at this interview with Doug Casey.) I think the quote is a succinct summation of the role 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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For those that missed it: Detlev Schlichter addresses the Adam Smith Institute Tuesday 22nd November, 2011. He argues that the present financial crisis is far from over; generally misunderstood and misrepresented, it is far from being a ‘crisis of capitalism’. Detlev traces the history of failure of paper money systems and lays out why present [...]

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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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