In their books Generations and The Fourth Turning, Neil Howe and William Strauss layout four generational archetypes that repeat through time. They have named these Prophets, Nomads, Heroes, and Artists. They believe that what emerges from this is a social and economic cycle that produces repeatable changes through time. In contemporary society, the generational archetypes…Read More
Gold mine production has historically grown at about 1.5% a year, roughly the rate of population growth of the world. However new deposits and particularly new economic deposits have become increasingly rare. This raised the question of whether we are at or past peak gold output. This article will line out some of the areas…Read More
From the US-China trade war to COVID highlighting the fragility of just in time supply chains, many people are calling for the end to globalisation and the nationalizing or at least regionalizing of supply chains. Consensus is that this move would be at least mildy inflationary, as new factories have to be built, in higher…Read More
We are coming to the end of the biggest credit expansion in history. While the expansion of credit has been devaluing for the USD and inflationary in terms of policy action, reflected in higher food, housing, and other asset prices, the net force of technology, too much debt and aging demographics is ultimately deflationary in…Read More
Books from “A Random Walk Down Walk Street” to “The Bare Foot Investor”, all expound the benefits of passive index investing. It is true that a superficial look at historical data for the S&P500 has shown that it has outperformed most active managers. However, a deeper look at other international indices as well as the…Read More
A recent thread on twitter from MMT proponent Stephanie Kelton got me thinking about the issue. The recent COVID stimulus funded by a massive deficit certainly has raised the question in a lot of people’s minds, though it was mainly papering over the cracks of a large amount of debt that wanted to deflate anyway.…Read More
Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon” Milton Friedman The historical technical definition of inflation is an increase in the money supply. However, the vast majority of use in both colloquial and academic use is an increase in prices. However even this definition is very broad and can refer to a wide number of phenomena, and these…Read More
The 1971 closing of the gold window, moved the world from a gold-based monetary system to a fiat-based system. Credit expansion then lead to indiscriminate debt and consumption replacing careful savings and investment, and many unintended consequences; economic, social, and environmental. Inspire by wtfhappenedin1971.com 1. Obesity Increase Due to excess consumption encouragement from increased debt, food…Read More
Kinesis is a gold and silver backed cryptocurrency which aims to be a complete monetary system. By depositing gold or silver for KAU or KAG tokens, you not only get fee-free storage for your precious metals but share in the profits generated from transactions on the Kinesis network. In addition to their metal backed tokens,…Read More
eToro describe themselves as a social trading platform, and there are some merits to their platform and social innovations. However, as you’ll see in their promotional video, they market themselves in a way that suggests that you can follow another investor and make money without the time and attention of traditional investments. The main flaw…Read More