The Gold Standard  

I am not the only one. Here is some company.

New York Times had this painful article about how job openings for workers are shrinking. It made me do a chart of job openings/pool of unemployed workers in the US. The ratio was 0.16. There is only one job opening per six unemployed worker.  I wonder if the Federal Reserve acknowledges its role in bringing [...]

While FT reports that Presidents Hu and Medvedev both warned on the impact of the crisis on the world and on the rising fiscal cost of it in general terms, it is good to focus on specific developments in both countries. Bloomberg has this news on Russia and this is Wall Street Journal’s piece on [...]

On the flight back from Zurich to Singapore, I caught up with Paul Volcker’s statement to the Banking Services Committee of the U.S. Congress (House of Representatives).  The full statement is here. He raises some uncomfortable questions:
However well justified in terms of dealing with the extreme threats to the financial system in the midst of [...]

On Thursday, the U.S. Federal Reserve released its quarterly flow of funds data. Quite a few trumpeted the USD2 trillion recovery in household networth forgetting that it is still about 11 trillion below the peak. More interesting is the outright contraction in household and business debt levels. Of course, business debt has just come down [...]

Gilian Tett’s piece (h.t Christopher Wood of CLSA) in FT on the new vehicle that Barclays is setting up makes for very interesting reading. She uses the right word to describe this: Chutzpah!
I would check out this programme from Channel 4, ‘Middle Class and Jobless’. They do a good job of investigating the true state [...]

The press release that the Swiss National Bank put out today after announcing their interest rate decision makes for interesting reading. A hint of optimism is laced with lots of caveats. This one sentence caught my eye:
In addition, the US has acted as a locomotive driving global economic growth because of its strong demand for [...]

The long flight from Singapore to Zurich gave enough time to catch up with the latest issue of ‘Economist’. I dare say that it contained many interesting stories. The one on India’s water problems was well-written. It was pointed and avoided laying it on too thickly. The survey on Indonesia was positive but from an [...]

I find time to catch up with John Mauldin, even if not regularly. This particular piece is worth reading, for it goes beyond markets and economics. As a parent with children who would be entering teens in few years, it struck a chord in me:
As our family grew, we limited the choices our seven kids [...]

One of the reasons for this long silence (among other things) is that if one does not get it right, either one must shut up and reflect or wait patiently for the tide to turn in one’s favour. I tried. I could not shut up and hence here I am. I am linking to two [...]