A great deal of hay has been made recently about the "rising" Canadian dollar. I really think this is the wrong way of looking at things. It would be more appropriate to say that the U.S. dollar is sinking. Hard. Why is this? I think the basic pattern is pretty simple to understand ( Read more... )

apenwarr: Your bit of economic theory is interesting, but I'm still pretty certain the key driver here is supply and demand, not price optimization. See, for example, the testimony by Paul Sankey before the U.S. congress on the subject: "Gouging is an Idiotic Explanation"The facts are simple: domestic demand in the U.S. for gasoline (refined crude ( Read more... )

After a roughly decade-long hiatus, I've been feeling a resurgent interest in macro-economics (probably spurred by my morbid search for evidence that the world is going to hell in a handbasket). In particular, I'm trying to sort out the details of the relationship between currency, commodities, and overall market activity. Don't really have much to ( Read more... )