Back in 2005 a reporter took a tour of General Motors’ headquarters, and in the resulting article one thing stood out: The executives and engineers the reporter interviewed were only modestly enthused about their sedans and sub-compacts. But they really liked talking about their expanded line of Hummers. Then oil spiked and gas prices hit […]
Breaking News/Best Of The Web
MarketWatch: ‘Big bear market’ for stocks lasting several months has begun. New York Times: “Era of low inflation and interest rates may be near an end.” Two-year U.S. yields at 2008 highs “are scarier than a 3% 10-year.” Trump’s lawyer takes Fifth in Stormy Daniels case, while his VA nominee withdraws. Gold and silver down […]
Top Ten Videos — April 26
Max Keiser: “Bitcoin is a black hole sucking in money from around the globe.” Danielle DiMartino Booth: “The Fed’s errors could implode the economy.” Jeff Clark: “Gold and silver are ready to break out.” Emigrate While You Still Can
When Investor Psychology Turns Dark, All News Is Bad News
Big companies report blow-out earnings. Home prices soar. North Korea promises to end its nuke program, possibly averting another Asian war. And stocks fall. Does this mean the news no longer matters? That’s exactly what it means. But it never did matter. In a world this complex, big things both good and bad are always […]
Getting Tight! Not Just Here But Everywhere
Let’s start with Caterpillar, the maker of earth moving equipment that has for years been the poster child for global slowdown. Every quarter was worse than the last as mining and construction companies around the world cut back on orders. Here’s a typical 2015 headline from Zero Hedge: “If Caterpillar’s Data Is Right, This Is […]
Fake Markets Produce A Fake Economy
Automtaic Earth’s Raúl Ilargi Meijer just posted an essential essay on the world’s financial markets – or what used to be the world’s financial markets. Here’s an excerpt: “[Price discovery] is the process of determining the price of an asset in the marketplace through the interactions of buyers and sellers”, says Wikipedia. Perhaps not a […]
The Pension Crisis Gets A Catchy Name: “Silver Tsunami”
Pensions really are in crisis, but the story is so full of large numbers, obscure projections, and dry terms like “unfunded liabilities” that not many people are paying attention. The same is true for a lot of other big trends out there, which is why those sounding the alarm eventually settle on pithy/scary (if not […]
Bad Bankers Drive Out Good Bankers: Wells Fargo, Wall Street, And Gresham’s Law
Back in the 1500s, a financial agent of Queen Elizabeth I named Thomas Gresham observed that that “bad money drives out good.” That is, if two kinds of money are circulating at the same legal value, people will spend the lower-quality money and save the higher. The latter as a result ceases to circulate. This […]
More Signs Of Inflation: Home Prices Jump Again And “$3 Gas Is Coming”
Cornflakes and milk may or may not be getting more expensive, but some higher-profile things are rocking like it’s 1979. Houses, for example: Home prices just took the biggest jump in four years (CNBC) – Homebuyers, hold onto your wallets. The gains in home prices are getting bigger as the supply of homes for sale […]
Is This The Long-Awaited Silver Short Squeeze, The Beginning Of The Next Bull Market, Or Both? Or, Sigh, Neither?
Silver’s popping today. Which is what people following the futures market action have been expecting for several months now. Speculators – usually wrong at big turning points and almost always at least slightly net long silver – have suddenly gone net short. This is almost unprecedented, and implies that a short squeeze – in which […]
Signs Of Inflation Spreading: Now It’s Trucks And Teens
In a world of cheap emerging market labor and ever-more-dexterous robots, inflation – especially the wage-driven variety – seems like yesterday’s news. But maybe not. It’s late in the cycle and things are getting tight, with pretty much the same result as in every previous expansion: Companies are having to pay up and look farther […]
No (Wall Street) Bank Left Behind!
Times have been hard for Wall Street banks lately, what with record amounts of cash pouring in and causing all kinds of bookkeeping headaches. So — big-hearted people that we are — Americans stepped up and helped by lowering the banks’ taxes. From Today’s Wall Street Journal: The Four Biggest U.S. Banks Made $2.3 Billion […]
The Empire Strikes Back, Part 3: “Big Meat” Tries To Define Away The Competition
Silicon Valley is pouring venture capital into startups that use cultured animal cells to grow meat. The hope (now backed with hundreds of millions of dollars) is that they’ll someday replace corn fields, feedlots and slaughterhouses with football-field sized vats from which an entire city’s hamburgers and chicken nuggets emerge sans animal suffering or land […]
More Absolutely Crazy Pension News
“War” and “pensions” are conceptually about as different as it’s possible to be. But – in a measure of how far into Crazy Town we’ve wandered – they’re both taking the world in the same direction. If a Middle East (or Asian!) war doesn’t spike oil prices and push the global economy into recession, then […]
Jay Taylor: How Much Longer Can the American Empire Run on Fake Money?
Excerpted from Jay Taylor’s Gold & Energy Stocks Newsletter: Gold rocketed to nearly $1,365 on Wednesday in New York, which is well above the $1,350 that Michael Oliver suggests is when technical price watchers will finally start to head into the yellow metal and related investments like gold stocks. But alas the banking cartel had […]
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