This past week we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Remarkably, only 1/3 of Americans today were alive when that happened.

In our previous discussion of the three options facing the FOMC – raise the funds-rate target, hold the rate steady, or cut the target rate – we argued that there were risks and potentially negative consequences associated with each.

The European Central Bank (ECB) did not reduce key interest rates at its July meeting ending last week, contrary to the expectations of some observers. This decision leaves the US central bank, the Federal Reserve, to take the lead with a widely forecast rate cut at its meeting this week.

My friend and Camp Kotok fishing-person Danielle DiMartino Booth is CEO & Chief Strategist for Quill Intelligence, a research and analytics firm that is celebrating the one-year anniversary of launching its publication The Daily Feather and the four-year anniversary of The Weekly Quill.

Congressional hearings this past week were the first of what are likely to be a number of investigations into Facebook’s proposed Libra cryptocurrency and associated Calibra wallet.

There comes a breaking point for everything, a moment, an “Arab spring,” when people governed by the callous and corrupt stand up and say enough. For the citizens of Puerto Rico that moment came after the indictment of two former island officials on corruption charges and the release of a…

Named for the last Hawaiian king (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kal%C4%81kaua), Kalakaua Avenue is Waikiki’s answer to Worth Avenue or Rodeo Drive. When you turn the corner out of the Royal Hawaiian Center into the throngs walking on Kalakaua Ave., Planet Earth’s multicultural diversity lies…

We received several comments from readers concerning some of the key points in our recent commentary “Clams or Gold.”[1] Below is an abbreviated version of the questions, to which responses are then supplied.

Four states – CO, WY, ID, UT – in six days; private professional meetings, a few public gatherings, two Chatham House roundtables, and one half-day with a fly rod.

My longtime friend Bill Dunkelberg and I brought nearly 40 trout to the net for release. An equal number escaped the net…

The positive trend of upgrades to downgrades continues. S&P reported on May 8th that upgrades outpaced downgrades by 2.39 to 1 in Q1 2019, which compares to 2.09 to 1 for all of 2018. In our monitoring of rating agencies’ actions, this trend appears to have continued in Q2.