Ron Hera's Blog

Excessive leverage and risk in the financial system, e.g., using customer funds to speculate, never ends well. Stock market crashes, bank and investment firm failures or economic recessions are all potential consequences.

Famed Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises wrote in his seminal work, Human Action (originally published by the Yale University Press in 1949), that “There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion.

Hera Research is pleased to present a sobering interview with Neil Barofsky, Senior Research Scholar, Senior Fellow and Adjunct Professor of Law at the New York University School of Law.

Gold, silver and crude oil prices are closely related to the movement of the U.S. dollar. After a healthy consolidation, gold began to move up in August 2012. At the same time, deteriorating expectations for crop yields in the American Midwest moved corn and soybean prices to new highs.

If there’s any better system to ensure a stable value for money, it’s yet to be found. For nearly all of America’s first 200 years, the dollar was linked to gold. Since we went off the gold standard, we’ve had more and more financial, economic and banking crises.

Gold stocks represent a tremendous value in relation to the price of gold and to the fundamentals of the sector. There has been tremendous shorting activity by hedge funds and, as a result, dedicated gold funds have experienced redemptions.

The history of the U.S. dollar is closely linked to U.S. involvement in a series of wars. The Bretton Woods Accord and the resulting world reserve currency status of the U.S. dollar were both byproducts of World War II (1939-1945). The Korean War (1950-1953) was followed six years later by the Vietnam War (1959-1975) which led to the end of the Bretton Woods system.

As a top currency analyst and frequent contributor to academic journals, Armstrong’s views on financial markets remain in high demand. Armstrong was requested by the Presidential Task Force (Brady Commission) investigating the 1987 U.S. stock market crash and, in 1997, Armstrong was invited to advise the People’s Bank of China during the Asian Currency Crisis.

Subjectivism is the philosophy that reality is what we perceive to be real and that no underlying, true reality exists independent of human perception. In other words, the nature of reality for an individual person is dependent on that individual’s own consciousness. It follows that each person experiences their own reality that is not shared with others.

Perhaps the greatest modern champion of central economic planning was the 20th century English economist John Maynard Keynes. Keynes, who was a political socialist and for a time a central banker, advocated the idea that the government should play a large, active role in the economy. Among the consequences of Keynes’ economic theories, whether intended or unintended, is the fact that Western economies today are characterized by large, central governments, central banks and massive debts.