Take a look at the chart below, and note the unnaturally smooth 80% decline. Kind of makes you think “imminent bankruptcy”. But now consider that the security in question is 100% guaranteed not to fall to zero and about 90% guaranteed to stay above 10. It’s VXX, an exchange traded fund that, according to its […]
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 — and the next month we’re back in a bubble. U.S. employment has stopped shrinking and started growing. Iron ore is up 170% in the past year and oil is flirting […]
Redoing the Kitchen While the House Burns Down
Wall Street Journal columnist Thomas Frank is by far the most interesting part of that paper’s dull gray Op Ed page. Back in January he suggested that the world’s governments smack down those wing-nut gold bugs by selling all the gold in their central bank vaults — a plan that most gold bugs found hilarious, […]
Another Day, Another Bail-Out
With a bail-out of Greece apparently imminent and everyone drawing parallels between the PIGS countries and the Wall Street firms that nearly cratered the global economy in 2008, this might be a good time to ask why each year seems to bring a new set of financial basket cases requiring taxpayer cash. The answer, of […]
Lies We’re Being Told: Interest is Consumption, Saving is “a Negative Act”
The latest piece of deep thought from iTulip’s Eric Janszen explains why, if the recession is over, so many people remain in such bad shape. More specifically, how can U.S. GDP be up by a robust 5% when oil imports and rail traffic are down and unemployment is still rising? The answer, in a nutshell, […]
What Does Japan’s Implosion Mean For the Rest of Us?
Standard & Poor’s is threatening to cut Japan’s credit rating, which doesn’t sound like that big a deal in a world where no one’s credit is quite what it used to be. But Japan is a special case. It’s been borrowing like crazy at rates two or so percentage points below what the U.S. pays […]
Health Care: Here Come the Unintended Consequences
As a general rule, DollarCollapse.com doesn’t get involved in public policy debates. Not because they aren’t important, but because the damage has already been done. The U.S., along with Japan and most of Europe, has passed the point where policy fixes are possible. There’s no magic marginal tax rate or Fed Funds rate or immigration […]
One Decision Per Decade: Three Choices
A few years ago the trust department of a major bank decided that it would be good to know where its profits were coming from. So they had their accountants run the numbers and found that, notwithstanding their army of highly-paid stock pickers, more than 75% of their investment profits came from sector choices. In […]
“The Last Time That Happened Was During the Great Depression”
Until a few years ago, running a U.S. city was pretty easy. You added services when voters asked, you hired more workers (who were likely to vote for you come election time) to provide the services, and you promised lavish retirement benefits to cops and teachers who weren’t going to retire until long after you […]
Paying Off The Past
Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal ran a great, sad article on the effects of the credit bubble on low-income people. A few excerpts: The ‘Democratization of Credit’ Is Over — Now It’s Payback Time Karen King owes nearly $36,000, more than she’s ever earned in a year. All day long, bill collectors call. She hunts for […]
James Quinn: It Started With Ron Paul
In addition to his day job as a strategic planner with an Ivy League university, James Quinn has, in the past year, become one of the Web’s handful of must-read bloggers. Nearly everything he publishes ends up in the DollarCollapse “Best of the Web” column, and his Burning Platform website now hosts high-level discussions on […]
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