Philippe Herlin

Let’s take a long look at the Fed’s Quantitative Easing, or QE, that we’ve been talking about regularly, to really appreciate its importance and meaning.

Last Thursday, there was quite a surprise : contrary to what the majority of market participants were anticipating, Ben Bernanke decided not to taper his QE (quantitative easing). Thus, $85B a month is still being created by the Fed to keep buying $45B of federal debt and $40B of mortgage-backed...

With the upcoming German national elections, the problems in the Eurozone have been left aside. Angela Merkel doesn’t want to lose some voters by talking about it. Her finance minister slipped, during the campaign, saying that Greece will have to be helped again but, not to worry, with only 10 bi...

The general feeling, or « sentiment », is leaning toward a tapering of money printing by the large Western central banks, due in part to the official statements of the Fed indicating it might taper its quantitative easing (QE). For now, it’s just an hypothesis invoked by its Chairman, Ben Bernank...

This drop in the price of gold in the first quarter of this year, though significant, will no doubt seem very soon like a glitch, a short pause. The price of gold really started to go up in 2002 when the Fed implemented its laxist policies and now the central banks are stuck with their printing p...

Goldman Sachs is above the law. On August 20th, this prestigious business bank is stung with a giant computer bug : their program sends out false orders in great quantities on the american options market and on certain quoted index funds. Which de-stabilizes these markets, and just goes to show h...

According to Morgan Stanley, in the week starting August 14, $760 million have been withdrawn from emerging countries funds, $590 million of which in Asia, for both stock shares and debt obligations. And this is the third consecutive week of withdrawals

There is an idea, the 'Great Rotation', that we hear a lot about since the beginning of the year, a great underlying movement that should be happening in the markets: investors moving from bonds to stocks.

There is no recovery. But, since the mainstream media and the governments keep repeating it over and over again and since we prefer believing good news than bad news, a majority of people believe in this so-called recovery. This is why the stock market is up and gold is down.

« Forward Guidance » is the new « in » phrase with central banks. It is supposed to reassure the market a few years in advance so that it can « anticipate » properly.

Is there still « real » price discovery, today, and in which markets? This manipulation of interest rates by the central bank affects all prices, the same way price controls do in centralized states

The situation is untenable in Japan and can only be contained in the States and the Eurozone if rates go just slightly up.

Investors must remain calm and keep a critical mind permanently. They have to go beyond the big media noise. And now is really not, really not the time to sell one’s gold.

Weirdly enough, the media didn’t dwell on this amazing issue, and the TV people didn’t even talk about it in their news bulletins. Of course, it’s about one of Europe’s most powerful man, Mario Draghi, head of the European central bank.

What’s happening in China? The interbank market succumbed to two panic attacks, on June 7th and last week, immediately doused by monetary injections from the central bank, the People's Bank of China, but tensions remain.

Along with its public deficits going the wrong way, as we wrote about last week, France has now to contend with its banking sector. According to Euromoney, a study from the Lausanne Center for Risk Management shows that french banks represent the most important systemic risk of Europe!

France is losing its footing. It just fell to the other side of the Laffer Curve : tax increases not only did not produce any revenue, but we’re witnessing a decline in fiscal revenue.

The european economy’s landscape looks sad... The Eurozone saw its GDP lose 0.2% in the first quarter, and the OECD revised to the downside its forecast for 2013 and sees a 0.6% recession ahead

Nikkei’s 7% plunge, last Thursday, and the way it happened, gives us a glimpse into how the next crisis will play.

China knows it has created a credit bubble. But its effects are subsiding and, contrary to the Western governments who keep printing and printing, China has put in place an emergency strategy that is the exact opposite of the actual bubble-creating policies.