Global Market Commentary, Analysis and Investments
Sign of the Times, Part 1: Federal bailout spending now exceeds the inflation-adjusted cost of World War II, according to our friends at the Independent Institute.
Senior Fellow William Shugart says World War II cost $3.6 trillion, but the bailouts now top $4 trillion. That’s actual money out of the taxpayer’s pocket, as opposed to the $12.8 trillion “lent, spent or guaranteed� figure you run across from time to time, a chunk of which might eventually be repaid.
[Read more...]Because of rapidly rising commodity costs the UK has experienced its quickest rate of food price inflation this year during the month of August, according to the British Real Consortium. In particular, wheat and sugar are two key ingredients behind steeply increasing expenses for food makers.
According to Bloomberg:
[Read more...]Wonder why university fees are so outrageously high? The question comes to us at least once a year. We’ve had at least one child in college for the last 14 years – often two. Year after year, tuition costs rise. A study reported in The Economist shows tuition rising at two to three times faster than household income over the last 40 years. For Ivy League schools the excess was 14 times income.
[Read more...]I was surprised when Mike Burk of Alpha Investment Management wrote that “Some of the NYSE breadth indicators look pretty good, but that is from strength in fixed income which makes up about half of the issues traded on the NYSE. Fixed income looks like a bubble.�
Well, being an admittedly stupid guy who just wants effortless and instantaneous satisfaction of every desire, I am, as such, not really into the “nuts and bolts� of things.
[Read more...]You just can’t keep a good economy down. At least, that’s what you think upon reading the headlines this weekend.
“Fears of double-dip recession recede,� was the headline in The Financial Times.
Why the receding fear?
The private sector created 235,000 new jobs in the past three months, the paper explained.
[Read more...]So gold is now at “fair value� says Bill Bonner, long-time gold bug and my former boss/partner-in-crime at The Daily Reckoning’s London HQ.
No, he won’t sell yet…if ever…says Bill. But gold’s huge under-pricing a decade ago has clearly passed by. Value-hungry investors got their “reversion to the mean,â€� and in the form of 400% gains, too. What one ounce of gold bought 2,000 years ago – a good suit of clothes, in Bill’s oft-repeated example – it now matches, if not exceeds in price, here in late 2010.
[Read more...]With his toes in the sand and the cool waters of the Atlantic Ocean lapping gently at his feet, your editor can fairly say we have reached the end of our little Daily Reckoning Coast-to-Coast Correction Tour. So where to now for your Ho-Jo-hopping correspondent? Ahh, more on that below. First, some more important considerations…
[Read more...]Ellen Kelleher, writing for The Financial Times, opens her article with how Baird & Co., in their warehouses in London, purify gold by heating it to molten form to make “medallions, bars, and rings,� which sounds like a lot of heavy, hot, back-breaking, dangerous work to me, as if the word “work� was not bad enough by itself with the terrifying adjectives.
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Burning the Economic Toast
Even though I have been drinking so that my speech is slurred after testing some crazy idea that I could drink away my utter horror at the death and dying of the US dollar and economy, history is, on the other hand, being made crystal clear that when a country is so idiotic as to ignore its own Constitutional requirement that money be only made of silver and gold (so as to prevent its over-issuance and thus prevent inflation, The Worst Of All Evils (TWOAE)), and then to compound that stupidity and perfidy by unbelievable over-production of the ridiculously-preferred fiat currency by the foul Federal Reserve mindlessly printing too, too much of it, for too, too long, distorting the economy into an ugly, cancerous, government-centric abomination, that country and its currency are soon toast, which is an unfortunate metaphor because I like toast.
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