The trouble began in the early 1980s, when we baby boomers entered our 30s and began molding the world in our own image. You can graph the spreading darkness from that point, as US debt, the number of government employees, the trade deficit and virtually every other measure of societal pathology inflected upward. Our generation, […]
Art of the Collapse, October 2010
These just hit my mailbox. They’re from the extensive portfolio of illustrator David Dees, and pretty much speak for themselves:
QE Questions
It’s been a while since US monetary policy was run with anything approaching a long-term strategy. For the past decade especially the goal has been to get through the week without a global financial collapse. So it’s probably asking too much to expect the Fed to have thought through the implications of another round of […]
Thanks Washington, But We’ll Do It Ourselves
I have a new hero. His name is Thomas Woods and he’s a Mises Institute senior fellow who just wrote a book on “nullification”, the act by which a state refuses to obey an unconstitutional federal mandate. According to Woods, the Founders saw nullification as not only a right of the states but a duty, […]
Now Start Watching Interest Rates, Part 2
Back in April I posted what seemed like an obvious little article noting that soaring commodity prices would probably send interest rates higher. Here’s an excerpt: Now Start Watching Interest Rates The phase change happened almost imperceptibly. One month we’re shedding jobs and agonizing over a long list of insolvent European countries and US states […]
Pensions: Even Worse Than They Seem
An article in today’s Wall Street Journal illustrates yet another lie we’re being told. It seems that pension funds, despite plunging interest rates and negative returns in the stock market over the past decade, are still assuming an 8% annual return on their assets. This allows them to pretend to be more fully funded than […]
Junk Bond ETFs: Another Big Short
Sometimes the market makes it too easy. Check this out: Desire for income drives high-yield bond ETFs’ popularity BOSTON (MarketWatch) — Investors fed up with U.S. stocks’ negative returns over the past decade and paltry rates in today’s fixed-income markets are piling into exchange-traded funds that invest in high-yield corporate bonds. “Where else can you […]
How You Store It
Everyone with any sense wants to keep some physical gold and silver at home, but no one with any sense wants to keep too much of it there. So as your holdings grow, so does your need for safe storage. Solari’s Catherine Austin Fitts and Carolyn Betts have published a guide to precious metals storage […]
The Low-Interest-Rate Trap
Pretend for a second that you recently retired with a decent amount of money in the bank, and all you have to do is generate a paltry 5% to live in comfort for the rest of your days. But lately that’s been easier said than done. Your money market fund yields less than 1%. Your […]
Euro Crisis, Part II
Remember the euro-zone crisis? Front page news for weeks, and then…nothing. Could they have found the secret formula for eliminating an overwhelming debt load without hyperinflation or depression? Nah. They were just taking a break, and now they’re back. Greece’s economy is contracting and Spain’s regional governments are being shut out of the debt markets. […]
A Sign of Things to Come?
This isn’t how it normally goes. For the past couple of decades — that is, during the parabolic phase of the global credit bubble — the financial markets have responded to US Fed announcements of easier money like kids whose daddy has promised them a trip to Disneyland. The euphoria doesn’t always last, but the […]
This Year’s Big Short
For short sellers, the pickings aren’t quite as obvious as they were in 2006. But they’re still pretty good. Muni bonds, for instance, are a disaster waiting to happen. But the juiciest short — akin to the subprime lenders during the housing boom — are for-profit colleges. They came to my attention a while back […]
Sebastian Mallaby: “Nobody Would Know Whom or What to Trust”
Here’s another take on the inflation/deflation debate from Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow and Financial Times columnist Sebastian Mallaby: Forget Jesus and ask the hedge funds The US stimulus debate features two warring camps. The Obama administration insists that a failure to stimulate will open the door to a double-dip recession. Its foes retort […]
Doug Noland: “Significant Unavoidable Cost”
In this week’s Credit Bubble Bulletin Prudent Bear’s Doug Noland makes a crucial point: It’s not inflation that the U.S. risks by issuing trillions of dollars of new debt, but “a crisis of confidence at the very heart of our monetary system.” Exactly. If we keep this up the financial markets might abandon dollar-denominated assets, […]
“We Could Really Use Some Good News”
Normally, the consumer sentiment number that comes out each month seems like a piece of media fluff, far less substantial than, say, housing starts or the gold price. But today’s report is unusual enough to deserve a longer look. From MarketWatch: Nothing happened, but the news was bad anyway Commentary: Historic decline in sentiment comes […]
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 109
- 110
- 111
- 112
- 113
- …
- 118
- Next Page »
