888 Number
Home
About
News
Bookstore Additions
Our Staff
Trustees
Our Location
Employment
Get Involved
Research
Briefs
Business Cycle
Conditions
Conferences
Climate Change (Fall 2007)
Future of the Dollar (2005)
IMF and World Bank (2004)
Property Rights (2004)
Gold Standard (2004)
Worksheets and Tools
Loan Interest Calculator
Cost of Living Calculator
How it Works
FAQ
Fuel Efficiency Calculator
Fellowships
Student Fellowship
Application
FAQ
Seminars
Methodology
Sound Money
Property Rights
Sponsorship Opportunities
Alumni
Testimonials
Research Fellowship
Support
Donate
Planned Giving
Planned Giving Calculator
Reserved Life Income Funds
Charitable Gift Annuities
Charitable Remainder Unitrusts
Planned Giving Example
IRA Rollover
Archive
Bookstore
Membership
Join
Renew
Research Reports
2010
2009
Economic Bulletin
2010
2009
Books
Personal Finance
Retirement Planning
Money & Banking
General Economics
Digital Store
Merchandise
Discount Programs
Donate
Downloads Area
Contact
Directions
Search
For Press
Search
Search Keyword:
Total 45 results found.
Ordering:
Newest First
Oldest First
Alphabetical
Section/Category
Who Will Fund Obama's Stimulus Spending?
The president’s stimulus package, which in the Senate version may top $900 billion, will require the United States government to go much further into debt to cover the cost of spending these hundreds of billions of dollars. The question is: Who is going to lend all this money to Uncle Sam? The current decade Federal government debt has doubled, from $5.6 trillion in 2000 to more than $10.6 t...
Friday, 06 February 2009
Bring on a Bank Holiday
As president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Timothy Geithner, the new secretary of the Treasury was one of a trio of senior financial officials that determined the response to the burgeoning financial crisis during the later phases of the Bush Administration. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke were the other two. The congressional hearing on...
Wednesday, 04 February 2009
Gold Prices in Recessions—Is This Time Different?
Some observers expect gold prices to rise in the coming months, despite the recession. As the first chart shows, normally gold prices tend to fall during U.S. recessions, as marked by the shaded areas. (The "monthly" average price for January 2009 is actually for January 7.) The tendency is far from uniform, however. In the back-to-back recessions of 1980 and 1982, the price first plunged, then r...
Monday, 12 January 2009
The Financial Crisis and Business Loans: The "Credit Crunch" That Isn't
For months, now, the news has been filled with reports of a huge credit crunch crushing the ability to borrow in the United States economy. The impression of a financial sector that has ground to a halt, however, is not born out by the facts. To the contrary, lending and borrowing have continued to grow in America, albeit at a lower rate of growth all through 2008. Banks have used a large portio...
Monday, 05 January 2009
Triffin’s Dilemma, Reserve Currencies, and Gold
Nearly 50 years ago, Yale University economist Robert Triffin identified the inevitable future deterioration of the dollar in his book, Gold and the Dollar Crisis: The Future of Convertibility (1960). Essentially, Triffin argued, under the Bretton Woods system in which the U.S. dollar was the world’s principal reserve currency (instead of gold, for example), the United States had to incur large...
Wednesday, 31 December 2008
There’s a Ponzi Born Every Minute
The financial fraud allegedly carried out by New York investment counselor, Bernard L. Madoff is considered the largest financial swindle ever. In all, Madoff’s 30-year-long Ponzi scheme is believed to have caused least $50 billion in losses and one suicide. The founder of the hedge fund Access International Advisors was found dead December 23 after his fund lost as much as $14 billion invested...
Monday, 29 December 2008
Research Preview: Did Derivatives Cause the Meltdown?
Sophisticated financial products such as mortgage-backed securities have taken the blame for the current financial crisis. But these instruments, which are designed to spread risk, play an important function in fostering economic prosperity. In AIER’s December 15 Research Reports, Donald R. Chambers, the Walter E. Hanson/KPMG Professor of Finance at Lafayette College, de-mystifies the complex...
Friday, 12 December 2008
Gold at $750 “per Troy Ounce”
In recent days, the price of gold has backed off to about $750 per troy ounce in the London p.m. fix. This compares to an all-time high just above $1,000 last March and a 52-week low of about $700. But why London? And why per troy ounce? For gold as for oil and other commodities, there are many different prices, which should all cross-convert with one another in some consistent fashion, as shaped...
Friday, 05 December 2008
Financial Meltdown Could Require Use of Depression-Era Rule
We are not yet in an economic emergency, as we were in the Great Depression. But should the government become unable to refinance its obligations, the Federal Reserve will refer to a Depression-era statue for the authority to finance the Treasury. That authority was established in 1933 by the Thomas Amendment to the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which amended the Federal Reserve Act. The statute p...
Monday, 01 December 2008
Gold vs. Equities Since 9/11
Gold’s performance as an investment in recent years has been impressive by any standard—and not least when compared with equities. Even allowing for the recent decline from around $900 to around $750 an ounce, gold has doubled or tripled in value since the Millennium, depending on what dates you choose to compare gold prices. Equities, on the other hand, have unfortunately proved the old adage...
Friday, 07 November 2008
The Financial Bubble Was Created by Central Bank Policy
With a collapsing housing market, a falling stock market, and a serious economic recession on the immediate horizon, the blame game about who or what has been behind the financial nightmare is in full swing. In recent testimony before a congressional committee former Federal Reserve Board Chairman, Alan Greenspan, pointed his finger at various financial insurance schemes and the inescapable uncert...
Wednesday, 05 November 2008
Back to the Future with the RFC of 1932
In a series of stutter-steps that have become the hallmark of the U.S. Treasury's approach to handling the subprime meltdown, the $700 billion bailout plan passed on October 3 was quickly revamped to emulate a British plan providing capital directly to banks. This tactic harks back to the long-forgotten Reconstruction Finance Corporation of the early years of the Depression, in the waning days o...
Wednesday, 29 October 2008
Is Consumer Credit the Next Bomb in the Economic Crisis?
Not surprisingly much of the economic news has focused on the financial crisis in the housing market. What has received less attention is the consumer credit market. As the table below shows, consumer credit outstanding has increased from a bit more than $2 trillion in 2003 to $2.5 trillion by the end of the second quarter of 2008, representing a 25 percent increase over five years. Out of this ...
Wednesday, 22 October 2008
A Shotgun Wedding — Big Government in the Banking Business
If you thought that that the word “voluntary” means the ability to say yes or no, you obviously haven’t been in Washington, D.C., lately. When the senior executives of America’s largest banks were invited to a meeting with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke at 3 p.m. Monday, October 13, they found out that the United States government intended to ...
Friday, 17 October 2008
Bailout Billions to Build Financial Sector Socialism
The U. S. government will be using at least $250 billion out of the $700 billion bailout package to buy equity shares in the some of the largest financial institutions in the country. In other words, as President George W. Bush, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke confirmed Tuesday, Washington will use more than one-third of that $700 billion for a pa...
Wednesday, 15 October 2008
Bailouts and Political Hubris
The financial crisis the U.S. and the world are currently going through is the result of years of government intervention and monetary mismanagement. The problem has not been caused by "deregulation" or a hands-off laissez-faire approach to the banking industry or the housing market. The banking and housing industries are and have been for decades among the most highly regulated sectors of the...
Tuesday, 14 October 2008
Double or Nothing; The Fed's Balance Sheet
Over the last year, especially since the Bear Stearns closing in March 2008, the Federal Reserve has done extreme damage to the parts of its own balance sheet that affect the money supply. Particularly at fault are the Fed’s Board of Governors and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which have dictated the terms of all the bailout efforts, as well as those regional Reserve Banks that follow th...
Tuesday, 14 October 2008
Bailout’s Purchase Plan Remains Unclear
There are many lacunae in the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008. We do not know the criteria that will determine which money managers the Treasury will hire to buy distressed assets from financial firms. We do not know how these hired people will perform their duty. Harvard’s Lucian Bebchuk proposes that each manager be given a small sum from the $700 billion (say $5 billion) to pu...
Tuesday, 14 October 2008
Government and the Costs of Doing Business Around the World—Latin America
When the World Bank surveyed the regulations governing businesses in 181 economies around the world, it detailed many reductions in regulation worldwide, particularly in many developing countries. But it also uncovered the how much many governments continue to make it difficult and costly to do business. Regulations that make it difficult or impossible to register a business, or to have land tit...
Sunday, 12 October 2008
“Now Is My Money Safe?” (An Update on FDIC Coverage)
A year ago, on October 9, 2007, the Dow Jones Industrial average reached an all-time high of 14,165. Yesterday, on October 9, 2008, the index had fallen by 39 percent, to 8,579. As the Wall Street Journal pointed out, the plunge erased $8.4 trillion in the value of U.S. stocks, the equivalent of more than half of the nation’s total output (GDP) for 2007. A recent government report says retir...
Friday, 10 October 2008
<<
Start
<
Prev
1
2
3
Next
>
End
>>
About
Contact
Search
Directions
Help
Privacy Policy