Some bubbles are more resilient than others. Some bubbles have a significant amount of yield to them, depending upon how fully they were inflated and how sharp the object poking them is. Some bubbles have thick, yielding coverings and are never inflated to rigidity beyond the point at which little kids sit ...read more

Iceland is a mess.  Total mess.  Bankrupt and its currency, the krona, has been abandoned by most people in the world. In Iceland it's lost two thirds of its former value and purchasing power.  Iceland is a nation that throughout its long 1100 history-year history has been extremely poor, depending ...read more

All right, we are all agreed – the dollar is doomed. But I haven’t heard much talk about what’s going to come after it, except for mutterings about going back to a gold standard. Let’s look at some of the possibilities. First, let’s consider a bit of history. Money was originally ...read more

Satyajit Das’s book, Traders, Guns & Money, opens with a great anecdote about a meeting with an Indonesian noodle company. The noodle men were “Indonesians of Chinese extraction,” Das writes. “They were part of the infamous ‘bamboo network’ of ethnic Chinese business interests that crisscrossed South East Asia.” The noodle ...read more

Society functions best when each individual minds his own business…literally. When concerns are local and governments miniscule — just doing modest things like protecting property rights and enforcing contracts — then things generally work out for the best. When governments get ambitious and each citizen seeks ...read more

 What follows is Part I of a focus on currencies including the U.S. dollar index, the yen, the euro, the British pound, and the Canadian dollar. There is a special emphasis on the yen. This analysis covers five factors: Technical analysis Politics Commitment of traders (speculation vs. hedging) of currency futures The carry trade Fundamentals Let's kick ...read more