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The use of Twitter and other social media to predict and trade on or, reflexively, generate interest in various assets is nothing new and has been around for years. Whether or not this strategy works is still unclear: the only "hedge fund" that

The Federal Reserve, already exhausted after a year of missteps in the spotlight, has one last trick to pull off before it exits the stage — getting out of the controversial bond-buying business without causing long-term interest rates to soar. “The

More than 2,700 City bankers pocketed more than one million euros in compensation last year, according to newly released figures from the European Banking Authority. Britain led the ranking for the highest paid with 12 times as many bankers earning

In the most dramatic evidence yet that Britons are paying for the rising cost of living by raiding savings, Yahoo UK reports that households are pulling money out of their savings accounts at the fastest rate in modern record, according to Bank of

In an out-of-the-way Google office, two life-size humanoid robots hang suspended in a corner. If Amazon can imagine delivering books by drones, is it too much to think that Google might be planning to one day have one of the robots hop off an

From the OfTwoMinds blog ______________________ By standards of previous generations, the middle class has been stripmined of income, assets and purchasing power. What does it take to be middle class nowadays? A recent paper, The Distribution of

The Fed's Catch 22 just got catchier. While most attention in the recently released FOMC minutes fell on the return of the taper as a possibility even as soon as December (making the November payrolls report the most important ever, ever, until the

Back around the turn of the century, when the common European currency was introduced, there was much hope and excitement about the future. It worked... for about 7 years. Unfortunately since 2007 things haven't gone according to plan and now the

Japanese investment bank Nomura is out with a big global economic outlook for 2014. The title is "The End Of The End Of The World." The theme is that as 2013 comes to a close, the age of crisis is well and truly over. There are still lingering issues

Last night I attended a private function put on by the National Economists Club where the guest of honor was none other than Ben Bernanke. You can read his full speech to the attendees here. Meanwhile, I'm still trying to figure out how a guy with my

Before it became a conspiracy fact, the traditional response to all suggestions of a massive Libor/FX/commodity/mortgage rigging cartel was a simple if stupid one: too many people are involved and so it can never be contained. As it turns out not

The Central Intelligence Agency is secretly collecting bulk records of international money transfers handled by companies like Western Union — including transactions into and out of the United States — under the same law that the National Security

Activist hackers linked to the collective known as Anonymous have secretly accessed U.S. government computers in multiple agencies and stolen sensitive information in a campaign that began almost a year ago, the FBI warned this week. The hackers

I Generally speaking, government always grows -- it never shrinks -- whether times are good or bad. I I In each area it purports to "assist", government attempts to replace individual decision-making with central planning. III In order to implement

World markets gave the U.S. debt deal a tepid reception Thursday, even as lawmakers opened the government for business and removed the threat of a costly default. Stocks were mixed in Asia, with Japan's Nikkei posting a 0.8% gain and the Australia

On Friday morning the U.S. dollar came close to its lowest point of the year against the euro, according to The Wall Street Journal, on expectations that the Fed will have to continue its easy money policies for longer than first forecast thanks to

On the global financial stage, China is playing chess while the U.S. is playing checkers, and the Chinese are now accelerating their long-term plan to dethrone the U.S. dollar. You see, the truth is that China does not plan to allow the U.S

Banks that are still viable but need state aid to boost their capital base should be allowed to receive help without inflicting losses on their junior bondholders, European Central Bank President Mario Draghi told the European Commission. In a July

The Federal Reserve shocked market participants in September with its decision to refrain from tapering quantitative easing, as many felt that the central bank had signaled the move at its June meeting. Fed chairman Ben Bernanke sparked a sharp rise

And so, one by one, the crazy pills theories start rolling out. Yesterday, as we first pointed out, Deutsche Bank made waves when it became the first "serious" organization to suggest that the Fed has now missed its tapering window, and will plough