Ah, saving vs investing! Now I recall... Cullen's whole thing on that is MOST people are saving. That's just the way he puts it. Since he runs a business advising people financially, he likes to emphasize that point because he feels the vast majority of people get themselves into trouble imagining t...

Someone here was concerned with IPO vs secondary market stock purchases... I'm not sure this covers it, but I think this was the pragcap article I was thinking of: http://pragcap.com/yes-government-deficits-equal-private-surpluses/comment-page-1#comment-151192 I'll keep looking to make sure... a lot...

Kshartle, IMO money is a social construct. The objects associated with it (electronic bank deposits, paper, gold coins) are tokens reflecting that construct. Did the native Americans of the Sierra Nevada inherently value the yellow rocks they no doubt saw in the rivers and streams? ... or did they v...

Cullen finally agrees to directly address three of hyperinflationist Vincent Cate's points: http://pragcap.com/a-friendly-reply-on-hyperinflation Cullen's response to one of Vincent's comments is interesting: he tells Vincent that if he insists that QE is "monetization" then he has to also...

Again on the "unbacked pieces of paper" ... I think you can make a good argument, that for a nation like Canada with a central bank fully committed to an inflation targeting scheme (2% a year), that the Medium of Account is well represented by a slice of the basket of goods and services wh...

Kshartle, Re: IPO: I think his point there is that he's looking at it from the company's perspective: stock purchases on the 2ndary market don't result directly in any further funding for the company in question.  He did a piece some months ago with lots of simple examples where he looked into the a...

Hi Gumby. Re: thoughts in the world I'm tuned into: I don't know! That's a great question. It may have been discussed and I just missed it. Your thoughts are the best (and only) I've seen on the subect.

An interesting explanation of why a central bank (in this case the Bank of Canada (BOC)) is like a bank with a 100% capital requirement, but one in which insolvency is not possible unless the "loans" lose 100% of their value: http://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/2013/12/...

An interesting question from Cullen's favorite MMist (David Beckworth):

Has The Natural Interest Rate Has Been Negative for the Past Five Years?

http://macromarketmusings.blogspot.com/ ... -been.html

Cullen & Schiff on the same show:

http://pragcap.com/me-peter-schiff-jim- ... -same-show

Gumby, thanks for the interesting quote from Francis X. Cavanaugh. I'd never heard of him or that book.

... on another topic for a moment, it looks like at least one conservative traditional monetarist (John Cochrane) thinks: "In my opinion, QE has essentially no effect. ... But the good news is that we therefore can't worry too much about its reversal. It’s neither going to cause hyperinflation,...

... the best thing about that "fool" piece is that they point out why those "liabilities" are not really like regular liabilities (e.g. local gov employee pensions). The law can be changed at any time on those programs, as has been done in the past. I wish though that he'd explai...

Thanks Gumby & TennGaPa, but Mark & Cullen really deserve the credit. In an attempt to try and figure out how Cox and Archer did their calculation (if indeed they did the work) I also looked at TR2011-1.pdf, but still no luck. So I don't know if those are supposed to be 75 year numbers, or &...

Gumby, after digging into TR2012-1.pdf and TR2013-1.pdf (following the links from the harvard blog commenter and Sadowski) I think it's a little more clear. Without the benefit of these docs to look at, I think your analysis was pretty good above. Can anybody figure out how Cox & Archer came up ...

OK, this is from the TR2012-1.pdf: "From the 75-year budget perspective, the present value of the additional resources that would be necessary to meet projected expenditures, at current-law levels for the three programs combined, is $38.6 trillion.112 To put this very large figure in perspectiv...

OK, Sadowski came through on this one :D http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=25927&cpage=1#comment-313779 "Assuming the $86 trillion figure is correct, it is the present value of the additional resources that would be necessary to meet projected expenditures at current law levels for all tho...

re: unfunded: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2012/11/27/wall-street-journal-article-on-calculating-federal-government-liabilities/#comment-194118 I read pg. 244 of the report, and I'm still not sure what I'm looking at there. One thing in the Cox & Archer piece that I thought was a little mi...

Unfunded liabilities: I put the question to both Cullen and Sadowski, with a link to the WSJ article. Cullen responded w/o the benefit of the WSJ article (which I put there later) here: http://pragcap.com/forums/topic/unfunded-liabilities#post-58016 So it's clear he wasn't sure what was meant by lia...

... ah, I see, that's in response to Libertarian666: Libertarian666, no, if they're insolvent that's a completely different story. The US is not insolvent, nor is Japan nor the UK. If the gov bonds were worthless in any of those countries, they'd be insolvent. The US most certainly is insolvent, as ...

moda0306, regarding the unfunded liabilities, I really can't give you an informed opinion on that. What are your thoughts? (although, whenever I hear "doomed" I get a little skeptical)

If the fed signals that it wants to depart from its mandate in unpredictable ways in the future, then we very well could have inflation or deflation. In fact, this is argued as one of the points of how the fed could FINALLY get some traction in the markets, rather than swapping assets (or maybe jus...

But what would your opinions of "monetizing debt" be in Canada where they have a 0% reserve ratio?  ... meaning that there is literally no affect on a banks ability to lend by enacting "QE" type programs. If central banks are doing a series of overnight interest rate targets (pe...

systemskeptic, you write You guys are making this harder than it is.  If QE prevented/reduced the deflation post 2008 then it was an inflationary stimulus... period. OK true, but QE1 was definitely a little different that subsequent rounds of QE: in that case the Fed really was overpaying for MBSs. ...

Libertarian666, no, if they're insolvent that's a completely different story. The US is not insolvent, nor is Japan nor the UK. If the gov bonds were worthless in any of those countries, they'd be insolvent.