and Investing
The wait continues regarding the tax reform proposal to come out of the White House and be taken up by Congress. Despite the headlines dominated by more peripheral matters, tax reform is shaping up to be one of the cruxes to the success of the new administration. It is not simply a matter of reducing … Continue reading “A Monetary Solution to Trade Imbalances? Gilder and the Gold Standard“
Michael Lewis, the author of various illuminating accounts of the events and progressions of the great financial crisis of 2008 – one of which became an Oscar-winning Hollywood movie – this time provides us with an illuminating account of someone else’s book – Mervyn King’s newly published The End of Alchemy. The thesis is a … Continue reading “An End to Alchemy?”
Western Christendom experienced a sea change in the late 17th century. On one side of that divide was theological dogmatics, scholastic philosophy, the divine right of kings and priests, and, seemingly in their train, wars of religion; on the other side, there was theological indifference, mechanical philosophy, government by consent of the governed, latitudinarian and … Continue reading “Isaac Newton and the Alchemy of Finance”
“Honest money” is a phrase bandied about as a self-evident truth. As the accompanying graph indicates, its incidence coincides with the heyday of the gold standard. As such, it is the pithy summary of a strongly-held view on the nature of money, which at the time of the gold standard had a highly political charge. … Continue reading “Honest Money?”
Seeing as how the gold standard is a “money method”[1] by which all exchange value is made dependent upon the weight of a certain substance, viz., gold, it would seem appropriate to “weigh it up” to determine whether or not, “weighed in the balance,” it is “found wanting.” Indeed, weight measurement was the standard of … Continue reading “Weighing the Gold Standard”