John Rubino
Articles by John Rubino
Of all the despicable side-effects of modern monetary policy, the worst might be the implicit encouragement artificially-low interest rates give small savers to take outsize risks. The only thing worse might be when government makes it...
Corporate share repurchases have turned out to be a great mechanism for converting Federal Reserve easing into higher consumer spending. Just allow public companies to borrow really cheaply and one of the things they do with the resulting...
One of the recurring themes of financial history is government over-reach leading citizens to mistrust the local currency and move money overseas, prompting the government to try to trap that wealth within its borders. This nearly always...
Insanity, like criminality, usually starts small and expands with time. In the Fed’s case, the process began in the 1990s with a series of (in retrospect) relatively minor problems running from Mexico’s currency crisis thorough Russia’s...
Financial bubbles are the office Christmas parties of the investment world. They start slowly, with a certain amount of anxiety. But they end wildly, with acts and decisions that in retrospect seem really, really stupid.
Millions of...
Millions of...
Picture a life where you do most of your shopping through Amazon.com and the local farmers’ market, most of your communicating through Facebook and Instagram, much of your travel via Uber, and much of your saving and transacting with...
When governments create insane amounts of money, the recipients of that money tend to behave accordingly. Consider:
Einstein scribbled his theory of happiness in place of a tip. It just sold for more than $1 million.
(Washington Post...
Einstein scribbled his theory of happiness in place of a tip. It just sold for more than $1 million.
(Washington Post...
Towards the end of financial bubbles, asset prices behave in ways that can’t be explained with rational/historical metrics. So new ones are invented to make sense of things. In the 1990s tech stock bubble, earnings were “optional” and “...
Central banks in general and the Fed in particular are struggling to understand a world in which they’ve thrown everything they have at the economy without generating “beneficial” inflation. Their confusion can be traced back to some...
As Hurricanes Harvey and Irma wreaked their havoc over the past couple of weeks, several interconnected questions popped up, the answers to which make us look, to put it bluntly, like idiots.
Why, for instance, are there suddenly so...
Why, for instance, are there suddenly so...
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