Tag Archives: yields

Free Lunch Finance

by CantillonCH

The poster girl of the voguish crankdom that is Modern Monetary Theory (“MMT”) – Stephanie Kelton, has been out pimping her new book – “The Deficit Myth” – with a great deal of help from the unofficial PR department which she seems to have, nestled within the House Organ of Davos, the execrable FT.

Here, Professor Kelton – for all the puffery about how fearless and radical is her approach – is pushing at an open door: a gaping aperture in the last bastion of economic rationality that is being held open by no less than Fed Chairman Jerome Powell, a man who recently went on record to boast: “We will never run out of money.”

[Also available as a podcast]

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Pump’n’Dump

by CantillonCH

One of the prevailing stories which nervous market participants whisper to each other at bedtime involves the timely appearance of the Fairy God-mother, hastening to Earth from Tir Nan Og to launch another multi-trillion round of money-printing the instant that our over-inflated asset prices suffer any meaningful setback. This comforting narrative, however, presupposes three key elements…

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Easy Money, Hard Times

by CantillonCH

Though the connexion is not always explicitly drawn, one obvious corollary of the perceived current shortfall in corporate investment spending is to be found in the lacklustre nature of the gains being recorded in something called ‘productivity’.

This latter deficiency is often said to have ‘puzzled’ the Good and Great who presume to be able to influence such matters for the better, but one can readily identify factors which implicate the policies of those same would-be helmsmen of the economy, themselves, in the discouragement they offer for capital formation and by the incentives they afford for less than ideal practices among businesses, consumers, and governments, alike.

For a downloadable PDF version of this article, please click: 17-10-27 Easy Money

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Ten Years After

by CantillonCH

A little over 10 years ago, a hitherto obscure German institution called IKB – majority-owned by an arm of the German government – suddenly made headlines around the world.

On the last day of July 2007, a company which ironically had its origins in a foredoomed effort to ‘stimulate’ the German economy in the aftermath of the Weimar Republic’s disastrous by financing small businesses, but also by partaking of the contemporary, pre-Depression boom in real estate, revealed that, once again, it had been seduced by the lure of a property bubble. [A version of this article appeared as part of the inaugural edition of ETF Stream]  Continue reading …

Givers of the Law

by CantillonCH

Pride of place for political news outside the US must go to the UK High Court’s decision that the infamous Article 50 clause by which Brexit is to be achieved cannot take place without being subject to Parliamentary approval. Continue reading …