Economic Trends Archives - Page 2 of 53 - Financial Trend Forecaster

Crypto: Crash or Opportunity?

Leave a Comment / Bitcoin / By Tim McMahon

Everyone knows that the Crypto market is volatile. And we got another dose of that on the 4th of July. But rather than fireworks, Crypto markets crashed. The year 2024, started out very bullish for Crypto, with Bitcoin (BTC) up sharply… partly due to BTC getting approval for ETFs and partly due to the expected halving which would cut supply. But so far this year, the truism “Buy the rumor, Sell the news” has held for the Bitcoin halving.

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The Results Are In: Free Market Capitalism Improves Lives

Leave a Comment / Economic Trends / By Lipton Matthews

The credibility of free market capitalism is constantly threatened by critics who doubt its propensity for engendering prosperity. Its reputation is battered daily by the venomous pens of left-leaning writers advocating statist alternatives and their conservative allies touting economic nationalism. However, such narratives are frequently punctured by the piercing evidence of empirical data. Anticapitalism offers nothing beyond the appeal of emotional rhetoric.

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Crypto Goes Mainstream

Leave a Comment / Bitcoin / By Tim McMahon

A lot is happening in the cryptoscape both from a regulatory and an innovation standpoint. Crypto has the potential to revolutionize the world as much as the Industrial Revolution, transistors, computers, or the internet did. And it is still in its infancy. But it is still possible for regulations to try to strangle the infant in its crib. But if that happens in one country, the innovation will simply move somewhere where it is appreciated. This could be devastating for the economy of any country that gets this wrong and tries to stifle innovation.

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Applying the ROC to Crypto

Leave a Comment / Bitcoin / By Tim McMahon

Our ROC system is very good at spotting major turning points in the market. So this month we adapted it to look at Bitcoin and Ethereum. While doing this we changed the look of how we do ROC, so we will be adapting the regular ROC charts to the new style as well. The advantage of this new look is that you can see the underlying index at the same time, so you can see exactly where the various signals kicked in and how it evolved from there. Also, I think the new look is much cleaner and less cluttered.

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Economic Education Has Become Economic Disinformation

Leave a Comment / Education / By Per Bylund

Economics education fails to communicate the obvious fact that markets solve problems, not that they require that all problems have already been solved. That students struggle with understanding the use and value of models, and may draw the wrong conclusions when studying market forces in the abstract, is unfortunate but understandable. It is the duty of the economics instructor to make sure students do not get the wrong ideas—that they go home with a greater understanding of how economies and markets work. Education, after all, should be enlightening and provide the student with new knowledge.

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The Modern Day Wild West: Crypto Scams And Opportunities

Leave a Comment / Bitcoin / By Tim McMahon

We’ve all heard that the Crypto landscape is much like the “Wild West” with very little regulation. But along with risk comes opportunity. One of the reasons the “Wild West” was so wild was because “Boom towns” would spring up in the middle of nowhere due to the discovery of gold nearby. The gold would attract not only hard-working prospectors and pioneers, but also promoters, grifters, and outright crooks. Sometimes a “Lawman” such as Wyatt Earp would show up and try to enact some sort of system of Law and Order.

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Global Debt Levels Are a Ticking Time Bomb

Leave a Comment / Economic Trends / By Daniel Lacalle

The relentless increase in global debt is an enormous problem for the economy. Public deficits are neither reserves for the private sector nor a tool for growth. Bloated public debt is a burden on the economy, making productivity stall, raising taxes, and crowding out financing for the private sector. With each passing year, the global debt figure climbs higher, the burdens grow heavier, and the risks loom larger. The world’s financial markets ignored the record-breaking increase in global debt levels to a staggering $313 trillion in 2023, which marked yet another worrying milestone.

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America’s Fiscal Collapse Accelerates

Leave a Comment / Economic Trends / By Peter St. Onge

In case you thought anybody in Washington was driving this thing, they are not.

It’s official: the Department of Treasury is now issuing debt at pandemic levels. It’s worth noting the pandemic record was double the previous record, which had stood for 231 years.

In raw numbers, the latest numbers for Q4 2023 show Treasury issued $7 trillion in new debt. For the entire year, it came to $23 trillion.

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Crypto 2.0, A Whole New Ballgame

Leave a Comment / Bitcoin / By Tim McMahon

It turns out that Crypto is much more than just Bitcoin. In October 2008, when a person (or anonymous group) named Satoshi Nakamoto created the code for Bitcoin it opened the door to more than just a currency. It introduced the concept of a “Blockchain” to the world. Since then there have been literally thousands of Cryptos created, most of which ended up totally worthless. Some were simply jumping on the Blockchain bandwagon, just as companies added “.com” to their name back in the Dot com mania of the 1990s, people began creating mostly worthless cryptos in the 2010s. But not all the cryptos were worthless. Some were new currencies but others were new and innovative ways to use blockchain.

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Argentina Sees First Monthly Budget Surplus in 12 Years

Leave a Comment / South America / By Peter St. Onge

Argentina’s Javier Milei is racking up some solid wins, with the fiscal basket case seeing its first monthly budget surplus in 12 years. Apparently, it took Milei just nine and a half weeks to balance a budget that was projected at 5% of GDP under the previous government. In US terms, he turned a 1.2 trillion-dollar annual deficit into a 400 billion surplus. In 9 and a half weeks.

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