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You can mark them up for whatever you want, but at some point, if you mark them up too high, and your product is in demand, you will exhaust the world's money supply. In a pure gold backed, non-fractional reserve banking system, the only way to repay a loan of gold, is for the borrower to...

How the heck does anyone "pay you 20% interest" when the gold supply is only growing, on an aggregate basis, by 1-2%/year? When you start talking about that fractional reserve stuff, then you're talking about creating debt-based currency. Which, by definition, becomes increasingly less and...

But they're lending dollars, to be repaid in dollars. They're not lending gold, to be repaid in gold + gold interest. Big difference.

Keep in mind that you would get repaid in gold, not dollars that have, over the previous 30 years, depreciated. The interest rate would only need to be slighty higher than zero (when measured in gold). If it was zero, of course, the owner of gold would simply retain their gold and not lend it...

I'd suggest that a gold debt should be repayable at a rate of interest equal to the production of new gold. Which is 1-2% per year (payable in gold, of course, and the principal must be repaid in gold). That we have 5-6% mortgages today is a reflection that investors believe that money (ie...

Maybe stocks are rising because, a collapse of the long-term bond market, would also collapse businesses' existing debts, and make it much more difficult for competitors to grow capacity. Likewise, with the crash in real estate prices that is underway, particularly in CRE, many businesses...

Yes, this is heavily at the root of the problem. You now have an entire decade of engineering graduates who are chronically unemployed or underemployed. EE grads finding it harder to find a job, than actually completing the EE degree itself! Chronic unemployment of the brightest people in...

Of course, as long-term interest rates go up, it becomes very difficult for firms to borrow, and hence, the value of existing productive assets increases in terms of the cashflows they can deprive (same demand chasing increasingly limited supply). 2 things that stand out in this environment...

No way! The people who would be 'grandfathered' into the system are the ones who paid the least into the system, and acted the most irresponsibly in setting up the system in the first place. If anything, they should suffer the most, because they were the ones out voting for this sort of...

Yeah but them immigrants are a net drain on the economy and push the system into an even greater deflation. Just look at the past decade. Many people have argued that the economic crisis that we're experiencing today was caused by an immigration-driven collapse in the tech sector.

But printing money actually may be making house prices go down, as such monetary expansion pushes up interest rates on the long end of the curve. Net result still becomes deflation overall, until, of course, the debt is completely liquidated from the housing/real estate sector, and housing can...

Proprietary trading against client order flow. Data fees.

Shut down 90% of the US banking system and the federal government immediately. Make having more than 1 chequing account and 1 credit card illegal. Take all of the resources that were consumed by the banking system and direct them towards US Citizen engineers, to rebuild all of the...

Trading, commercial banking and investment banking is also a 'commodity skill'. But we don't see rampant outsourcing there, for instance. The Goldman Sachs' of the world aren't racing to replace their NYC trading desks with Indians, to save money on pay and bonuses. So no, that wouldn't...

Yeah Achilles, there's still plenty of engineers who never were able to recover from the 2001 recession. Having more engineers running around chasing the same jobs isn't the answer. The only 'education' required, I would submit, would be to confine bankers to "re-education" concentration...

Yeah China's engineering salaries are just fine....in CHINA! In fact, they're upper middle class salaries. Big problem in the USA is overpriced assets, and the insanely overpriced service sector (ie: finance, law, healthcare, etc.). Chinese engineers get paid, what, $1000/month? So if...

I know engineers who graduated during the 2002-2003 recession who still haven't found jobs afterwards. In the high tech sector. A complete and utter disaster, IMHO. The new grads might be fresher, but they have been exposed to commensurately higher expenses and debt load.

Yeah, we've cooked our own gooses (geese??) by such poor attitudes in the workforce. Instead of supporting science and engineering endeavours throughout the economy from the 1970s-onwards -- we supported financial endeavours, while letting our best and brightest students 'survive' on Postdoc...

Internet company business plans are still as broken today as they were in the late 90s. Amazing that a decade hasn't change much of anything.

At some point, there will be enough cash out there, and prices will have declined so much that houses will be cash-purchase items. All manias/bubbles eventually resolve this way. Overleverage is the precursor to under-leverage. If the fed steps back, prices go down even more...there...