Behind the "Global Savings Glut"

A recent article in The Arab Times seems to shed some light on where all the money sloshing around the world creating asset bubbles is coming from:

We in Kuwait seem to have run out of ideas for the time being and our past generations were more creative and looked deeper into our human resources to give their best. The overseas investments have their limits and it is time to seriously think of ways of making and creating new job opportunities for our youngsters and improve their capabilities and abilities. This is the only way to move forward as our financial resources are beyond our abilities and capabilities. It may take some time to come with the right answers but this will not happen without passing some laws through our parliament. Most importantly the land utilization law and liberalization laws to allow the private sector to move forward. The government owns more than 95 percent of the Kuwaiti land and with the BOT law still under revision almost all projects have been shelved awaiting the new laws to be approved.

Comments

Thinking about ICOs.

The ICO craze is in full swing. Etherium goes from 30 cents to > $300. The Ten-X ICO and others raise millions in no time. The secondary market for it shoots up massively. The two questions I ask in every bubble are: Where is the money coming from? How can I monitor that source of money to know when the money is going to stop coming? My best guess for where the money is coming from in the ICO bubble is China. China is the home of all the big Bitcoin mines and has a cottage industry of schemes to exfiltrate money out of China and into anywhere else. The "money" is also coming out of Bitcoin to some extent and into other crypto currencies due to high transaction fees. What Countries are using crypto currency? If we look at bitcoin search trends for Bitcoin : We see the U.S is at number 10. And Ethereum, the smart contract cryptocurrency powering the newly hatched ICO world: We see that the U.S is way down the list at number 18. Google under

What's Bernanke going to do during the housing crash?

A Recent NY Times article on the Japanese Housing Bubble got me thinking. Especially this quote: Japanese economists say the United States is not likely to suffer a decline that is as severe or long-lasting as Japan's, because they see a more skilled hand at the tiller of the American economy: the Federal Reserve. Japan's central bank, the Bank of Japan, failed to curb the stock and real estate bubbles until mid-1989, when it was too late and prices were sky-high, they said. Translation: It's different this time! Is it really? Let's listen to some words from Mr Bernanke : But the U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost. By increasing the number of U.S. dollars in circulation, or even by credibly threatening to do so, the U.S. government can also reduce the value of a dollar in terms of goods and services, which is equivalent to

Why there will be no hyperinflation

I have been reading the inflation/deflation debate for some time now on various parts of the web. The inflationists insist that we will collapse like Wiemar. The deflationists insist that we will collapse like Japan. The memory of the 1970s inflation is strong in many an old gold curmudgeon, so the inflationists seem to be more prevalent. I will in this essay attempt to argue that hyperinflation will not happen if global commodity markets remain priced in dollars. The reason for this is that if inflation increases, the rest of the world will bid commodities up drastically, especially oil, and severely throttle U.S economic growth, leading to a more restrictive monetary policy. Hyperinflation always happens due to a foreign exchange crisis. The population, sensing a high level of inflation, rushes to change their earnings in for real goods or foreign currency. In the case of Wiemar, or Argentina, the rest of the world is largely unaffected. They see their currencies drastically

Economic Mischief - Contrarian Political And Economic Analysis

Search This Blog