Today’s issue of The Daily Reckoning finds a resurgent US stock market. Despite dipping – briefly – into the red for the year-to-date a couple weeks ago, the S&P 500 is closing out the first quarter with a gain of 6%! Despite the noteworthy stresses around the globe – and the considerable economic uncertainties here at home – the S&P sits less than one percent below its peak levels of the last two-and-a-half years.
[Read more...]US Inflation Worse than Zimbabwe?
March 17, 2011 By Leave a Comment
If you live in the United States, your cost of living – even by official stats – is rising twice as fast as in Zimbabwe.
A Curious Divergence
March 5, 2011 By Leave a Comment
This could be important: the dollar has NOT gained from the unrest in the Arab nations. People no longer seem to see the dollar as a haven of safety. Instead, they turn to gold…
Watch this space. Because now, both good news and bad news send gold higher.
Smart central banks are buying gold. Smart investors are buying gold. Smart businesses and hedge fund managers are buying gold.
[Read more...]Monetary Madness
August 27, 2010 By Leave a Comment
For some reason, everyone is taken aback because, as James Mackintosh at The Financial Times puts it, “Stanley Druckenmiller, one of the masters of the investment world, this week announced his retirement saying that he had become frustrated over the past three years with his inability to make outsized returns,? which makes me laugh my Huge Mogambo Butt (HMB) off at Mr. Druckenmiller, and laugh at hedge funds everywhere because, as Mr. Mackintosh reports, “the average macro fund had lost 1.2 per cent, after small gains last year, according to Hedge Fund Research. By contrast, global equities are down 5 per cent since January.?
[Read more...]A World of Phony Prices and Twisted Numbers
August 4, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Remember our discussion of prices yesterday? Here at The Daily Reckoning, we have nothing against higher prices…and nothing against lower prices. It's dishonest, misleading, and treacherously false prices that we don't like. They send the wrong information. They may tell us that an item is plentiful, for example, when it is actually in short supply. They may cause us to invest our money in the belief that profit margins are increasing when they are actually shrinking. They may also induce us to expand production, when the world already has far too much of what we have to offer.
[Read more...]Government Employees: The Last Great Consumer Base
August 4, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Things in the economy are getting more and more stressful, and the company's revenues are down, precipitating the rumor around here that there are going to be more cuts in staff, and the odds are pretty good that I will be one of those unceremoniously fired since, ever since they fired Carl, I am now the company's worst employee.
[Read more...]Deflation: The Blood on Bernanke’s Hands
August 4, 2010 By Leave a Comment
We left off yesterday’s issue “When Good Falling Prices Go Bad” wondering what stock market investors were thinking. They bought stocks heavily on Monday. Then, yesterday, they sold them a bit – the Dow fell 38 points.
[Read more...]A Crude Display of How to Invest in Oil
July 28, 2010 By Leave a Comment
I get a lot of mail concerning my single-minded fanaticism about how gold, silver and oil are the best investments to buy when your stupid government is deficit-spending and allowing excess amounts of money to be created, in our case by the Federal Reserve, and particularly that part about buying oil, meaning, of course, oil company stocks.
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The US Federal Reserve: A Rich History of Financial Folly
Ehow.com relates a piece of history in that “Since the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913, the money supply had increased 240 percent from 1913 to 1920, because of a relaxed gold standard, and prices had risen by an identical amount.”
Gaahhh! Prices rising 240%! In seven years, the money supply increased 240%, meaning it more than doubled, as did prices! No wonder they had a recession!
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