Gold is a Lousy Investment
on Nov 20, 2009 in Currencies Benjamin Graham gold Yes, you read me correctly.  Gold, despite recently surging to new all-time highs, is a truly lousy investment.  And this is not just my view; it is the view of Benjamin Graham, the mentor of Warren Buffett and the father of modern investing!  Con...

Fund Me With Billions Or Trillions, And I’ll Be Okay As Well
on Nov 20, 2009 in Auto Reorganization The car companies are not “turning a corner,” and Wall Street is not “healing.”  And yet that is what I keep hearing and reading.  The price of cars went up a few percentage points after falling for years.  This points to b...

Must the Dollar Fall if Stocks Rise?
on Nov 19, 2009 in Currencies You know the drill: stocks up, dollar down.  With investors rediscovering their appetite for risk, the dollar has lost its appeal as a safe haven and has resumed the downtrend it was in long before the financial crisis.  So, a falling dollar only m...

Excesses of the Past Are Shaping the Healthcare Debate Today
on Nov 19, 2009 in Uncategorized The NYT has two Opinion pieces that are instructive today.  Not because they are right, but because they are myopic in their treatment of the issues at hand.  Nicholas Kristof writes of the raging opposition to Medicare when it was first proposed a...

Japan: Deflation Continues
on Nov 18, 2009 in Deleveraging and Deflation Japan deflation More bad news from the land of the rising sun.  Deflation in Japan continues across a wide swath of goods and services, even while the country sees some of its highest economic growth rates in years.  Consider this recent Bloomberg post:  Japan De...

Betting It All On Black (Friday)
on Nov 18, 2009 in Uncategorized I wrote an article for DTI discussing how consumers are transmitting their intentions loud and clear, we just don’t seem to be listening.  Every day the drum beat grows a little louder.  In some island language of drumbeats and rhythm consume...

Funding Another Bubble - What Choice Do We Have?
on Nov 17, 2009 in Uncategorized In the 1990s we were educating people about the very predictable spending patterns of consumers and how, when coupled with the huge number of people at their peak in spending, this would cause massive consumption that would last through the 2000s. ...

Forget About Inflation
on Nov 16, 2009 in Deleveraging and Deflation Inflation vs. Deflation Gary Shilling gave an interview with Yahoo! Tech Ticker in which he lays out a scenario very similar to that of HS Dent: Mr. Shilling is taking a hard contrarian view here. It’s accepted as near “gospel truth” that inflation ...

10 States In The Worst “State”
on Nov 12, 2009 in Uncategorized The FT ran a story this morning that describes 10 states as being much like California in not only their budget woes, but also their constraints in dealing with their fiscal issues.  The problems include loss of revenue, large budget gaps, legal obs...

“White House Aims To Cut Deficit With TARP Cash”….And Other 4th Grade Math That Would Get A Failing Grade
on Nov 12, 2009 in Uncategorized The WSJ - and everyone else - is reporting this morning that the Obama administration is considering taking unused TARP funds and applying them to the federal deficit.  Everyone who suggested or went along with this should be publicly marked with t...