The Gold Standard  

These two concluding paragraphs from the latest market comment of John Hussman are worth paying attention to:

That doesn’t mean that stocks can’t advance further, and it’s impossible to rule out potential enthusiasm that the Treasury “public-private partnership” idea might engender. But the relentless failure to properly respond to this crisis has increased the probable duration [...]

China’s central bank governor posted a note on the web site of the People’s Bank of China proposing a new global reserve currency. The key points are here:

They may either fail to adequately meet the demand of a growing global economy for liquidity as they try to ease inflation pressures at home, or create excess [...]

‘Economist’ has  a story on the Swiss National Bank (SNB) deciding to buy foreign currencies aggressively. It ends the story with these two paragraphs:
Back in the 1930s many countries had to choose whether or not to abandon the gold standard. Those that did so soonest tended to suffer least during the Depression. In these days [...]

T. K. Arun makes a suggestion that Indian government should borrow abroad. He mentions a sizable sum of USD 20 billion.

The government should meet a part of its huge borrowing programme by issuing bonds abroad. Non-resident Indians would lap it up. So would a number of invitees to the forthcoming G20 summit: it shouldn’t take all that [...]

Nearly a month ago, Indonesia successfully placed two sovereign bond issues successfully for a sum totaling USD 3 billion. The news article is here. Earlier this week, a British gilt auction failed to receive 100% response. A German five-year bond auction narrowly missed the same fate. Here is a FT news report on these two matters.
The FT [...]

Received from a friend:  
——————————————————————–
March 24, 2009
The Editor
Financial Times
Sir: Structured investment vehicles to invest in tranched mortgage-backed securities with plenty of leverage have been duly condemned for the huge problems and losses they caused.  So to solve the problems the United States Treasury now brings us structured investment vehicles to invest in tranched mortgage-backed [...]

From Chrystia Freeland in FT on the denial among top financial types on public anger:
… in the days after the Bolshevik revolution, Russia’s bourgeoisie didn’t think much had happened, either, and stock prices held steady on the Petrograd exchange. 
The full article makes a lot of sense. The denial about public anger is due to denial [...]

Paul Krugman has been hammering away at the absence of co-operation from European nations on stimulating their economies. Perhaps, if he had seen this news item in FT, he would have had second thoughts. The article header, ‘Eurozone consumers defy gloom‘ leaves no one in doubt as to the content.
Again, thanks to Paul Kedrosky, I [...]

Among the various blogs I visit, if I were to pick my top favourite, I would pick Paul Kedrosky’s Infectious Greed as the most valuable resource. A visit to his blog today introduced me to this long but very worthwhile piece by Simon Johnson, former Chief Economist of the IMF in ‘The Atlantic’.  Some of [...]

A good friend did a google search on PPIP and it came up with Pain Put In Perspective. Interesting.  Here is some perspective.
Useful to start with three resources:
(1) Tim Geithner’s piece in WSJ yesterday
(2) The Treasury of the US Government page on facts of the Treasury plan:
(3) Tracy Alloway in FT.com does some early math [...]