Yesterday was a good day for stock market investors. Prices went up. The Dow rose 254 points, leaving us uncertain about its near-term intentions. Of course, we’re always uncertain. But sometimes we’re more uncertain than others. What seems certain to us is that stocks are a bad bet. You might find this interesting, dear reader: [...]
Stefan Zweig pegged it right after all. In the late 1930s, the Austrian playwright and writer sought relief from war-torn Europe and settled in Brazil. He loved it. In 1941, he moved there and wrote his book Brazil: Land of the Future. Brazil, he thought, “was destined to become one of the most important factors [...]
The difference between the 1930s and today is that the credit expansion of this generation has been far greater. Does that mean a deflation to come that’s even more severe than in the ’30s?… Original Source
What changed over the last century? One hundred years ago government was small, money was hard, and leverage could be found and used, but it was costly in real terms since there was deflation most times. Then came the Fed: Money was cheap. Although there were slumps, asset values, unlike trees, actually did grow to [...]
What’s going on in Arizona? The state legislature has passed a law that allows the police to stop anyone on the street and ask him for his papers. If his papers are not in order, the fellow is in trouble. The idea is to discourage illegal immigrants. Here at The Daily Reckoning our views on [...]
Bloomberg News reports: The biggest increase in employment in three years makes it “pretty clear” the deepest U.S. recession since the 1930s has ended, said the head of the group charged with making the call…. Source
“How can you keep talking about a depression,” asks a Dear Reader, “when the economy is clearly recovering just as it should be.” Ah ha! We’ll explain in a minute. First, the latest from Wall Street: The Dow fell 18 points yesterday. We’re still not sure whether the final, fading phase of the bear market [...]
“All life is a process of breaking down,” the great F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote. “But the blows that do the dramatic side of the work…don’t show their effect all at once.” These other blows you don’t feel until it is too late to do anything. Fitzgerald was writing about his own famous crackup in [...]
The chart above (click to enlarge) shows the growth rate in Industrial Production,… Source
From Brian Wesbury and Robert Stein:”Since the financial turmoil began, many… Source
“A nightmare decade for stocks,” says a headline in The Wall Street Journal. “Investors would have been better off investing in pretty much anything else, from bonds to gold or even just stuffing money under a mattress. Since the end of 1999, stocks traded on the New York Stock Exchange have lost an average of [...]
Claptrap! Nonsense! Balderdash! Everywhere we look, someone is saying something ridiculous. Which is good news to us. This Daily Reckoning was getting to be serious work…what with the world facing a total financial meltdown and all. So, we’re pleased to be able to lighten up by, once again, telling you what an idiot Tom Friedman [...]
In the 1940s, renowned science fiction writer Isaac Asimov began writing a trilogy of novels called the Foundation Series. Asimov’s protagonist discovers and develops “psychohistory,” a mathematical science that statistically predicts the general course of future events for large groups of people. As it turns out, Asimov’s idea was actually science, minus the fiction. [...]
The age of de-leveraging is upon us. Bad news for the US economy; good news for gold. For the past 60 years, corporate debt has grown faster than the economy – 4.1% annually for debt, compared with only 2.7% for the economy as a whole. In short, more and more debt went toward producing each [...]
In the 1940s, renowned science fiction writer Isaac Asimov began writing a trilogy of novels called the Foundation Series. Asimov’s protagonist discovers and develops “psychohistory,” a mathematical science that statistically predicts the general course of future events for large groups of people. As it turns out, Asimov’s idea was actually science, minus the fiction. [...]
We saw it coming and got it wrong at the same time. But at this price, it’s hard to complain… $1,092 an ounce this morning, another record high for gold. Back in September, the IMF announced it was selling a boatload of its gold reserves in order to finance its global interventions. We thought China [...]
