Year of the Jump Ball - Part I: Payback - Eric Janszen

“Politics, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.”
― Ambrose Bierce

“Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
― Thucydides, The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped only to liv...

Essential Trends - Part II-B: War Economy Theory

U.S. Marines landing at Inchon as battle rages during Korean Civil War.
Location: Inchon, Korea
Date taken: 1950
Photographer: Hank Walker
Life Images

• Inside an engineered stagflation

• Post-credit bubble, pre-war economy

• Sectors of the stock market speak

(This article is a continuation of Essential Trends - Part I-B: Gold in an Era of Global...

Photo Credit: Eric Janszen, Back yard, Summer 2011

"All these leaders understand, but never admit, that the motivation and incentive for Americans to resolve these critical problems—to improve our education, health care, and energy systems; to control our debts, live within our means, and so on—have been gradually reduced by the U.S.-dominated global speculative financial system that they themselves have helped create."

- The Big Bet, by Eric Janszen and an...

Enlisted men tear up a flag they took from Socialist protesters in Boston, 1947

The Next Ten Years – Part I: There will be blood

Shrinking pie politics supplants 30-year-old credit-financed fantasy of plenty

The Right Questions*

• Can the US economy recover?
- On the unrecoverable error of a credit-financed economic boom

• Can the US escape its output gap trap?
- On perpetual output gaps, structural unemployment,...

I really like this flowchart except for one disturbing interpretation I discovered in your presentation. "Global Reflation" - "Dollar Depreciation" - "Oil Price Recovery" seems to operate backwards in time, i.e. future events influence the past. The same problem exists with the previous ... "Global Recession" - "Oil Demand Crash" - "Oil Price Crash". I suspect this is an artifact of your presentation method but it is unsettling once noticed. Don't give up. This rats nest of process interaction...

Stagflation Investment Idea – Part I: Multi-family residential real estate

Inflation discussions typically focus on the price side of the inflation equation, but the income and expenditure side shows how households are responding to changing prices, especially wages and other income relative to goods and services prices. As part of our ongoing quest to look for ways to move out of our Treasury bond position that we have been in since the year 2000, today we look at the...

Inflation is a process, not an event - Part I: Three inflation fallacies Inflation is a process, not an event - Part I: Three inflation fallacies - What have we forgotten the nature of inflation since the 1970s? - Where is the U.S. economy in the transition from low to higher inflation? Monetary authorities and economists focus on inflation expectations because inflation expectations have a way of becoming reality over time. Inflation expectations, after falling hard in 2008, have been stead

...

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” - George Santayana

Deflation is back in the headlines. Quantitative easing (QE) is the call.
• Can the government and the Fed keep the money supply growing and prevent deflation?
• Is the deflation a real threat?
• How much QE is required?
• Or is QE irrelevant?
• Double-dip recession or staggering recovery?
• Gee, can’t we just depreciate the dollar again?
• From the Complaints...

Follow the money, let the data lead you, stay independent, and accept the fact that the political economy is not quantifiable In his impetuous missive “Economics is Hard. Don’t Let Bloggers Tell You Otherwise” Richmond Fed researcher Kartik Athreya goes after the economics blogging community like a blindfolded kid batting a piñata full of hornets and received a series of predictably stinging responses. Presenting his own views and not those of his employer, he argued that bloggers practicing ...

Krugman Should Quit Paul Krugman was interviewed on Bloomberg today presenting a very bleak outlook for the US economy, even using the phrase "third depression". That hardly seems like an unreasonable forecast given global financial conditions and the zombie-like state of the US consumer. But his policy advice borders on the insane: Massive fiscal and monetary stimulus. That is, federal deficit spending and monetary stimulus including further "quantitative easing", i.e. money printing. Even more ...