British Pound is known to be a stable currency. Great Britain is a strong economy. But, Great Britain was finding it difficult to stay within the tight exchange rate band set by the European Monetary Union (EMU) in the early’90s. One person who made history with options was George Soros who is famously known as the man who broke the Bank of England.

George Soros had this intuition that the Bank of England would be forced to devalue British Pound. So he bought call options on German Marks and put options on British Pound. He made a bet of $10 Billion by leveraging all the assets in his hedge fund.

Bank of England had made a number of public statements regarding its intention of staying within the EMU. However, within a few days of the speculative attack on the British Pound, Bank of England was brought to its knees as it was …

In this post, Charlie Rose interviews Kenneth Rogoff, professor of economics at Harvard University, on the economy.

Charlie Rose sits down with Kenneth Rogoff.

Click here or on the image below to view the video. (As there is no direct link to the clip, you need to click on “Archive” on the Charlie Rose site, and then scroll down to the Roggoff video of November 10.)

Source: Charlie Rose, November 10, 2009.

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Do you know how to read Point and figure charts? Point and figure trading in many ways is similar to the support and resistance breakout trading on bar or candlestick charts. The main difference is the look and functionality of the price charts themselves!

Bar charts and candlestick charts show the high low open and close price for a given period. Point and figure charts represent price in a radically different manner from the more familiar bar and candlestick charts. Many forex charting platforms provide the option of point and figure charts.

Point and figure charts do not show any timeframe. This may confuse you in the beginning. Point and figure charts are a pure price action play because these charts generally exclude all other elements like time, volume and open/close other than price. Point and figure trading is based exclusively on price action.

Point and figure charts represent clear evidence of such …

Niall Ferguson, Professor of History at Harvard University and author of the brilliant “The Ascent of Money“, is interviewed by Martin Wolf, the FT’s chief economics commentator, at the FT View from the Top conference on the future of capitalism.

Click here or on the image below to view the video clip.

Source: Niall Ferguson, Financial Times, October 29, 2009.

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The Economist’s Buttonwood Gathering, a conference bringing together global regulators and bankers to discuss and debate new ideas and develop a new set of guidelines moving forward, has just taken place in New York. Michael Panzer, writer of the Financial Armageddon blog and author of “Financial Armageddon: Protect Your Future from Economic Collapse”, was in attendance and has kindly shared some of the more interesting quotes on his blog, as reported below.

Secretary Tim Geithner, United States Department of the Treasury:

“Generally, we did not do enough.” (Referring to the failure to address growing concerns over excessive risk-taking in the period leading up to the financial crisis.) [Editor's note: understatement of the year?]

Stephen Roach, Chairman, Morgan Stanley Asia:

Those who are looking for a “V”-shaped recovery are in for “a rude awakening.”

“The imbalances going into the crisis were large to begin with.

...

During the summer, I had the good fortune to attend two excellent conferences focused on new findings in exchange rate economics (yes, not all economic research is focused on the financial crisis and recession). The first was a Bank of Canada-European Central Bank conference Exchange rates: The global perspective, and the second was the NBER International Finance and Macroeconomics Summer Institute session "Exchange Rates and Relative Prices".

Figure 1: Log nominal value of US dollar (blue) and real value of US dollar (red), against currencies of major trading partners. NBER defined recession dates shaded gray, assuming the recession has not ended by July 2009. Source: Federal Reserve Board.

The Bank of Canada-ECB conference papers are here. All the papers, as well as powerpoint files of the presenters and discussants, are available from the conference website; I've reproduced some of the abstracts below.

Order flows and

...

As attested to by the large amount of coverage of the recent US-China Strategic and Economic Dialog [0] [1], [2], [3], [4],[5] China looms large in any discussion of the world economy. One of the most important contributors to the informed discussion on this subject was Brad Setser, at the Council on Foreign Affairs and before that at RGE Monitor. Unfortunately, Dr. Setser will be leaving the blogosphere, so his insights will be missed (although fortunately for us, he'll be adding his input at the NEC, where we all wish him well).

So now, there'll be even a greater need for reasoned analysis. One addition to the discussion is a Symposium on China's impact on the global economy just published in Pacific Economic Review (August 2009). From my introductory chapter to the symposium:

Over the past decade, China's presence

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Forex Trading: An Interview With Forex Market Expert Thomas Fischer, Part 1

by Dr. Scott Brown, Education Director of Investment U

Forex trading is hot, hot, hot right now. And one of the biggest reasons why is that traders are using leverage to amplify returns by 200 times - where $1 controls $200 worth of foreign currency. The returns can be staggering.

For example, on the British “Black Wednesday” of September 16, 1992, George Soros made a single day’s forex profit of $1 billion by short selling the Great Britain Pound Sterling.

At the time, these kinds of profits were only available to large players.

But recently, a major change in the way forex trading is done has opened the trading desks to the little guy. The Internet has opened the door to the small investor into this $3.98 trillion daily market.

But forex, or foreign exchange trading, has a reputation as

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Stock Market Rally in Financial Horror Movie. Drag Me to Hell! That’s the title of the first horror movie with a credit crunch theme. No kidding. We just read about it in the Financial Times. The idea of the movie is simple enough. A young woman is a mortgage loan officer at an LA bank. She wants a promotion… but to get it she has to prove that she’s tough enough to say ‘no.’ So when a creepy customer comes in and asks for an extension of her mortgage, the woman rejects the proposal… perhaps a little too coldly.

Then begins the horror.

But just look around. There are plenty of frightening and unnatural scenes going on.

Broadly speaking, it’s a merciless war between inflation and deflation. But there are many different attacks, ambushes, counterattacks, feints, and massacres going on.

The Dow retreated 173 points yesterday. Typically, following a major fall

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Behold the “negative basis trade,” per John Dizard: “You can own a corporate bond, or emerging market sovereign bond, buy default protection on the paper with CDS, and collect interest payments for taking no risk. That’s right: because CDS prices are depressed, relative to the comparable bonds, you can collect money for taking no risk.” Per Riccardo Barbieri of BofA-Merrill Lynch, “as long as [oil] prices rise only moderately from here – say, revisiting the $80 a barrel level by year-end, this would not pose severe risks for the advanced economies, while the emerging ones would be able to tolerate even higher levels, say, $100, in due course.” David Pilling notes that “Vietnamese exports have been fairly resilient. While economies such as Singapore and Taiwan have seen declines of 30 or 40 per cent in shipments, Vietnam was down a modest 3.7 per cent in the first ...