Public opinion of the Fed is that of being a vigilant watchdog of inflation. Always seen as watching economic indicators and ready to adjust the interest rates in order to “fight” inflation. This is of great irony, because it is the very same Fed that...

Would you lend money to a counterfeiter? I wouldn’t think so. Then why do countries such as China and Japan hold over $1 trillion each from the US which has recklessly been printing greater and greater amounts of money since going off the gold standard?...

Why are diamonds valued more than water? Water, not diamonds, is necessary for life. So shouldn’t it be more valuable? Classical economists puzzled over this question and named it the value paradox. Scarcity of goods is what causes humans to attribu...

Instinctively our minds are wired to detect patterns. Any person looking at a typical stock price chart will feel that he/she can predict where it will go based on where it has been. How strong is the pattern recognition of humans? Consider the followi...

Consider a simple scenario where an individual has some grain. He could either: Eat all of the grain now and over the course of winter. Eat the bare minimum of grain to survive and save the remainder to plant next year’s crops. What are the con...

There are two commonly held views as to why money has value: 1. People are willing to accept it as payment (social convention) 2. The government says so (government decree) The first reason, that being that money has value because people are willin...

I have a growing concern regarding paper money. That concern is what defines a “dollar”. A dictionary definition describes a dollar as being a basic monetary unit equivalent to 100 cents. Further investigation reveals that a cent is equal to 1/100th o...

Studies in neuroscience have shown that while the human brain excels at pattern matching, it does not distinguish well between perceived patterns and actual patterns. From a strictly evolutionary perspective, if you see a pattern that might indicate that ...

“By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.” (John Maynard Keynes, chief architect of our present-day fiat money system) The Mission Statement of the...

The most common measures are named M0 (narrowest), M1, M2, and M3 (broadest). M0 is the starting point for the concept of money supply. It is the total of all electronic, credit-based deposit balances in bank (and other financial) accounts plus all...