Any stories like the one below are almost laughable in the current belief system of "everything is too big to fail, and anything on Earth can be bailed out so just buy stocks".  But just keeping it in front of you - one day this sort of fundamental issue will matter again.  I will keep pushing out the United Kingdon ahead of Japan as the potential "big one" that hits first, since Japan's debt is mostly financed by their own population (who has a high savings rate).  So in theory their situation could go on a very long time since they require very little from foreigners to k

Following up on my last post, I want to use this post to write about the long side of the carry trade- specifically the Australian Dollar.

I wanted to highlight a few quick recent charts of how the US Dollar Index positively correlates (moves in the same direction) with the 3-month Treasury Bill Discount Rate.

It’s not the most fascinating topic, but it’s definitely important to know of this relationship, so let’s take a look at a couple of recent charts.

First, a ‘zoomed in’ view of the recent action:

You can view this comparison in StockCharts with symbols:

$IRX for the 3-month T-Bill Discount Rate (short-term)

Many newer readers of The Simple Dollar haven’t been exposed to the hundreds of great articles in the archives of the site, so this is a weekly series that highlights the five best posts from one year ago this week, two years ago this week, and three years ago this week. I call it … the Time Machine.