Last night was a stinker of a night, as Big Ben Bernanke decided to do a Bullwinkle and pull a rabbit out of his hat, and tell an audience that “inflation must be watched extremely closely.” Like that’s something new! UGH! Shouldn’t a central bank (that is, if you really feel one is needed) would be “watching inflation closely at all times”? So, he was telling people that he was doing his job, and the markets took it as some great indication that interest rates will rise in the US sooner than expected… Really? And this “new thought on rates” comes from what Big Ben said last night? Really? Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle!
[Read more...]US Treasury Bond Interest Rates: Nowhere to Go But Up
March 14, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Charts from contraryinvestor.com show that, as of right now, there is going to be almost $1.8 trillion in US Treasury debt maturing this year, and all of it will need to be “rolled over” by issuing new debt.
Perhaps it is also instructive that they also note that “Just shy of 50% of UST debt ‘rolls’ within three years.”
[Read more...]US Real Estate Market Sits in the Waiting Room
September 9, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Dead guys walking…
An article at the Zero Hedge website says Paul Krugman is either “an imbecile or a fraud.?
We wouldn't go that far. He might be only mildly retarded…or the victim of higher education. He has learned so much about modern economic theory that there is no room left in his brain case for good, old common sense.
[Read more...]Combating Annuities With Gold, Silver and Oil
July 5, 2010 By Leave a Comment
People are always writing me and asking questions, which can usually be divided into one of two categories. The first category is the one that I call “Is there something wrong with you that you sound/look/appear so stupid/ugly/weird?? (Answer: “Probably?), and the other, smaller category is the one I call “Other.?
[Read more...]Money Supply Flood to Drown US Economy
February 18, 2010 By Leave a Comment
I can tell you the exact date (Saturday, February 13, 2010) that I saw that TheDailyBell.com had a guest Editorial by Dr. Ron Paul, who I admire because he is the only Senator in Congress whose economic philosophy is the Austrian school of economics, which, in fractured German, is ein Austrian economischer, which I purposely use to paraphrase John Kennedy, who famously said, Ich bin ein Berliner, which actually translates from German as I am a cream-filled pastry, but everybody knew what he meant, which was that he was just another clueless American Democrat who wanted to save the whole world by taking over the whole world so that they could change the whole world, and who had the majority of American voters and Congress behind him, all of whom have heads that, for all apparent intents and purposes, are cream-filled, and that is why Kennedy said that he, too, behaved as if he had a head filled with whipped cream.
[Read more...]Economic Recovery: Demanding More Purchasing Power
February 8, 2010 By Leave a Comment
What a delight it would be to have some inflation! Yes, dear reader, thats the real reason that fiscal stimulus appears to work. That is, thats the reason inflation can sometimes boost employment. It creates inflation. And inflation lowers wages. Lower wages make it cheaper to hire people. And they make US output more competitive on the world market so exports tend to increase.
[Read more...]Economists Serving their Political Masters
January 22, 2010 By Leave a Comment
On January 14, 2010, an academic economist took a rare stance. Tenured professors rarely lift the veil from numbers that governments invent. In “Don’t Like the Numbers? Change ‘Em,” Michael J. Boskin, Ph.D., formerly, an economics professor at Harvard and Yale; formerly, chairman of the Counsel of Economic Advisers in the George H.W. Bush administration; currently, T. M. Friedman Professor of Economics at Stanford University; research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research; senior fellow at the Hoover Institution; and board member of the Exxon Mobil Corporation, Oracle Corporation and Vodafone PLC (among others), wielded his sword.
The Wall Street Journal devoted a half page to Boskin’s list of offenders. Politicians are interfering with the Gross Domestic Product calculations in France and Venezuela. They have toyed with the inflation rate in Argentina. In the U.S., the Obama administration has taken the phony numbers game “to a new level.” Here, Boskin is writing of the current adminstration’s calculations of jobs “created or saved” from its stimulus bill.
The Case for Cash: Why a 0% Yield Is Sometimes Your Best Bet
What a wild week it was! Last week, the US bumped off Osama bin Laden. Silver collapsed. Unemployment looked terrible on Thursday…and better on Friday.
Stocks looked like they were in trouble…but then seemed to stabilize by week’s end.
And President Obama suddenly became The Decider.
[Read more...]