In a recent posting, I looked at how demographic changes in the United States would have a long-term impact on housing prices.  As baby boomers who were large consumers of U.S. housing age and become net sellers of residential real estate, the supply of homes for sale will exceed the demand for

Switzerland National Bank's (SNB) recent announcement that they were allowing the value of the Swiss franc to float upwards against the euro, discontinuing the ceiling exchange rate of CHF1.20 to one euro and that they were cutting interest rates on deposits to minus 0.75 percent took

The announcement that the Swiss National Bank (SNB) was allowing the Swiss franc to "readjust" in value took the market by storm.  Switzerland had long been preventing the value of the euro to weaken below 1.20 against the franc, maintaining the cap by printing francs to buy euros in

The collapse of the oil price has created losers and winners, and like every major movement in a commodity sector, the trick for investors is figuring out which side of the trade to be on. The most obvious victim of the slide in Brent and WTI prices over the last 6 months has been the major oil

A speech by Jeremy Stein, former Governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis looks positively prescient, particularly as interest rates appear to be heading up and the price of oil has fallen substantially.   In his speech, "Overheating

Low oil prices today may be setting the world up for an oil shortage as early as 2016. Today we have just 2% more crude oil supply than demand and the price of gasoline is under $2.00/gallon in Texas. If oil supply falls too far, we could see gasoline prices doubling within 18 months. For a

The oil price drop that has dominated the headlines in recent weeks has been framed almost exclusively in terms of oil market economics, with most media outlets blaming Saudi Arabia, through its OPEC Trojan horse, for driving down the price, thus causing serious damage to the world's major oil