Category Archives: Uncategorized

I – The Nominal and the Real In economics, there are two kinds of problems:  real problems and nominal problems. The deforestation on Easter Island destroyed most of the Rapa Nui.  When it was necessary to leave the island and … Continue reading →

As we discovered before, the marginal decision on cashflow re-allocation drives cyclicality. There are principally three types of capital allocation transactions. If you are expanding capital stock, or you are funding the expansion of capital stock, you are investing.  This … Continue reading →

Interest in rentierism has begun to percolate in the last few years.  I propose a framework for analysing and discussing the modern state of rentierism in the terms of behaviours, incentives and empirical impact on the economy. Both the capitalist and … Continue reading →

Has the United States of America reached, and perhaps passed, “peak capitalism” – the point where the maximum number of people participate in capitalist relationships? The argument could be made, at least on a relative basis, that it has indeed … Continue reading →

Investment: Driver of Cyclicality GDP, the measure of the nation’s income, is the sum of 4 components: Y (GDP) = C (Consumption) + I (Investment) + G (Government Spending) + (X [Exports] – M [Imports]) The most volatile component is investment. … Continue reading →

Benjamin Franklin wrote a piece in 1729 entitled A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper-Currency. The contents of which surprised me a great deal.  Ben Franklin champions ideas that are attributed to Marx, Keynes and others 150-250 … Continue reading →

In the jilted age of cynicism towards our institutions, the enormous success of capitalism over the past 60 years can be summed into the above chart.  It represents the cumulative effect of households systematically investing in equities, and then selling … Continue reading →

While not the only driver of economics and asset returns, policy-making has a great deal of influence over growth and prices.  In order to estimate its effects, we generalise both monetary and fiscal policy to a percentage which represents how … Continue reading →

With leading indicators like per-capita initial claims edging into the top 30% of all desirable readings (figure 1), the unemployment rate at a post-recession low of 7.8%, and the S&P 500 now less than 10% from its pre-bust peak, the … Continue reading →

Time has not been generous enough to allow for any writing recently. Since you probably just come here for the charts, anyway, I'm going to present the charts we've created — what we are looking at — without comment. See … Continue reading →