In interviews, whenever I try to make the case that US policies are leading to the kinds of currency disruptions common in developing countries, I say something like, “For a glimpse of America’s future, take a look at Argentina, where they’re eating cats and dogs because of hyperinflation … wait, no, I meant Venezuela.” Mixing […]
Inflation Is Back, Part 5: “The Cost To Run A Restaurant In New York City Is Unbearable”
If you’re running a business and the price of one thing goes up, you can work around it by economizing elsewhere. But when everything – wages, rent, supplies, taxes – goes up simultaneously, you have a problem that can be solved one of only two ways: Raise prices or close up shop. That’s the dilemma […]
Inflation Is Back, Part 4: Maybe The Phillips Curve Was “Just Resting”
Economists have been struggling to explain how unemployment can fall to 4% without wages starting to accelerate. The following chart shows paychecks rising at about the rate of inflation over the past five years, which means the average worker’s earnings don’t buy much more now than in 2013. The reasons for this glacially slow recovery […]
Gold And Silver: Sell In May And Go Away? Not Exactly
It’s easy to dismiss seasonality in the price of a tradable asset. After all, if supply and demand fluctuate regularly you’d think the resulting arbitrage would attract enough traders to smooth out prices. But that’s apparently not the case with gold and silver. Here’s an analysis from Casey Research on the subject with a couple […]
America’s Dumbest Companies Repeat Their Biggest Mistakes
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 […]
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 […]
Inflation Is Back, Part 3: 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 […]
Inflation Is Back, Part 2: 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 […]
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