Category Archive: 6b.) Debt and the Fallacies of Paper Money

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Is it Time to Buy Real Estate? Yes and No

2016-06-07

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2016-06-07

  Is it Time to Buy Income-Producing Real Estate?  No, No, No. Much to the dismay of my real estate buddies, who are complaining about how high prices while watching the cash flow of their portfolios bursting at the seams from a few good years of ren...

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8 Lessons That We Can Learn From The Economic Meltdown In Venezuela

2016-06-05

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2016-06-05

Submitted by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog, We are watching an entire nation collapse right in front of our eyes.  As you read this article, there are severe shortages of just about anything you can imagine in Venezuela.&nb...

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Swiss Referendum: The new World of Bread and Circuses

2016-06-04

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2016-06-04

Swiss Referendum Minimum Income
9 out of 10 workers could be permanently replaced by robots. The working classes of Rome were put out of work by “robots,” too – slaves captured in Rome’s many successful conquests. Given the Swiss initiative for the minimum income, welcome to the world of bread and circuses!

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Twitter’s Other Growing Problem – A Surging Share Count

2016-06-04

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2016-06-04

It seems like almost everybody has an opinion about Twitter. As for the company it seems that their “window of opportunity” to massively succeed has essentially closed as user growth and revenue have both slowed, quite dramatically, over the past 18 months. Oddly, the strategy at Twitter seems to be not to thrive, but just to survive.

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Turning Stones Into Bread – The Japanese Miracle

2016-06-03

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2016-06-03

  Stuffing the Futon Our friend Ramsey Su just asked what Haruhiko Kuroda and Shinzo Abe are going to do now in light of the strong yen (aside from perhaps doing the honorable thing). Isn’t it time to just “wipe out some debt with the stroke of a pen...

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Guided By Nonsense

2016-06-03

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2016-06-03

  Seven Year Achievement   “Read the directions and directly you will be directed in the right direction.” — Lewis Carroll   See? It’s easy Janet! Just read the directions! Illustration credit: Walt Disney   U.S. consumers are at it again.  After a s...

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Grasping Parasites and Bernie the Underdog

2016-06-03

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2016-06-03

The system changed in 1971, when President Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard. Since then, the powers that be no longer depended on Congress… or savers…or voters… to raise the funds they needed. What about Bernie Sanders?

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Arrant Star Trek Socialism

2016-05-31

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2016-05-31

  Robotic Utopia In spite of the fact that Marx expressed nothing but disdain for his Utopian socialist predecessors such as Henri Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte, variants of Utopian socialism evidently live on. The latest iteration of the socialist d...

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On the Road to Panicville

2016-05-31

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2016-05-31

  An Alert for the Global Posse of Liquidity Junkies In the summer of 2015 and again in December-February this year, global stock markets were rattled by weakness in the yuan’s exchange rate vs. the US dollar. Yuan weakness is widely held to exacerba...

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Economy “Improves”, Americans Get Poorer

2016-05-31

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2016-05-31

  No Surprises BALTIMORE – We were not surprised by the big news last week. We saw it coming. Figures from the Conference Board research group revealed productivity sinking for the first time in three decades. We promised to explain why it was such a...

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The Stunning Idiocy of Steel Tariffs

2016-05-30

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2016-05-30

  Victims of the Boom-Bust Cycle The world is drowning in steel – there is huge overcapacity in steel production worldwide. This is a direct result of the massive global credit expansion that has taken place over the past 15 years. Much of this capac...

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A Thank You to the Jackasses Running the Economy

2016-05-30

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2016-05-30

  Rolling Back 200 Years of Growth BALTIMORE, Maryland – The press reported mixed financial news on Thursday. House sales, oil, unemployment figures… up, down… the news left investors puzzled.   Two of many symptoms of the much-bewailed “populist bac...

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Venezuela’s Gold Reserves Plunge To Lowest Ever As Maduro Repays Debt With Gold

2016-05-29

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2016-05-29

Several months ago, as Venezuela's hyperinflating, imploding economy was spinning in freefall, leading to the dramatic episodes of total social collapse such as those profiled in "Scenes From The Venezuela Apocalypse: "Countless Wounded" After 5,000 ...

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How Elon Musk Helps Fools to Part Ways with Their Money

2016-05-28

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2016-05-28

  Tesla Goes Fishing Tesla Motors is up to something remarkable.  But what it is, exactly, is unclear.  According to the Tesla Motors website, the company’s mission is: to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable transport.   Tesla Model 3: t...

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The Power Elite: Bumbling Incompetents

2016-05-28

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2016-05-28

Is there any smarter group of homo sapiens on the planet? Or in all of history? We’re talking about Fed economists, of course. Not only did they avoid another Great Depression by bold absurdity…giving the economy more of the one thing of which it clearly had too much – debt. They also carefully monitored the economy’s progress so as to avoid any backsliding into normalcy.

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Democratic Fun in Tajikistan

2016-05-27

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2016-05-27

  Capo for Life! The people of Tajikistan love their president Emomali Rahmon deeply. And as we now know, nearly all of them do. The last time a leader of similarly exalted stature enjoyed such unconditional and unshakable support from the entire cit...

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Sloppy Decisions at Greenlight Capital and Pershing Square

2016-05-26

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2016-05-26

  Not Just Wrong, but Monumentally Wrong Massive flaws at SUNE (Sun Edison) + VRX (Valeant) were somehow missed by both of these high profile/ well resourced hedge funds.   David Einhorn (Greenlight Capital) and Bill Ackman (Pershing Square) – both f...

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Time to Raise the White Flag at Gualfin?

2016-05-26

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2016-05-26

  Who Cares What Voters Want? BALTIMORE, Maryland –  There were two newsworthy developments last week, neither of them really important – the first because it won’t happen, the second because it won’t matter. First, the Fed let it be known that it ha...

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Nigeria Currency Devaluation Looms As FX Forwards Crash To Record Lows

2016-05-25

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2016-05-25

Despite US equity investors' exuberance over bouncing crude oil prices, the world's crude producers continue to suffer and while Venezuela is in the headlines every day (having already collapsed into chaos), Nigeria appears the nearest to that abyss ...

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Are Investors Idiots?

2016-05-24

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2016-05-24

  Black-and-Blue Crash Alert Flag Let us  begin the week “on message.” The Diary is about money. Today, we’ll stick to the subject.  Old friend Mark Hulbert has done some research on the likelihood of a crash in the stock market.   Ye olde tattered C...

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