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

March to Default

“May you live in interesting times,” says the ancient Chinese curse. No doubt about it, we live in interesting times. Hardly a day goes by that we’re not aghast and astounded by a series of grotesque caricatures of the world as at devolves towards vulgarity. Just this week, for instance, U.S. Representative Maxine Waters tweeted, “Get ready for impeachment.”

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“People Need to Understand that their Biggest Asset is Individual Liberty” – an Interview with Claudio Grass

As election season is upon us in Europe and political and economic tensions are heating up, Claudio Grass notes that “the euro is the most artificial currency in history”, highlighting one of the most fundamental problems at the heart of the EU’s troubles. It is undeniable that public awareness is growing, and so is active opposition to ever greater centralization of political power.

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Welcome to Totalitarian America, President Trump!

If there had been any doubt that the land of the free and home of the brave is now a totalitarian society, the revelations that its Chief Executive Officer has been spied upon while campaigning for that office and during his brief tenure as president should now be allayed.

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The Long Run Economics of Debt Based Stimulus

Something both unwanted and unexpected has tormented western economies in the 21st century. Gross domestic product (GDP) has moderated onward while government debt has spiked upward. Orthodox economists continue to be flummoxed by what has transpired.

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Boosting Stock Market Returns With A Simple Trick

Trading methods based on statistics represent an unusual approach for many investors. Evaluation of a security’s fundamental merits is not of concern, even though it can of course be done additionally. Rather, the only important criterion consists of typical price patterns determined by statistical examination of past trends.

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Gold & Oil – Ross Clark.Setting Up For a Crash? – Bill Bonner. PDAC – Michael Fox. Update AMY:TSX.V

Air Date: March 11, 2017 Ross Clark – Gold and Oil. email: [email protected] Bill Bonner – Will Trump Drain the Swamp? Too Much Equity in FANGS: Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Google – Setting up for a Crash Similar to the Tech Disaster of 2000? Guest’s website: https://bonnerandpartners.com/ Michael Fox – Update on PDAC – Mining is …

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Speculative Blow-Offs in Stock Markets – Part 2

As noted in Part 1, historically, blow-patterns in stock markets share many characteristics. One of them is a shifting monetary backdrop, which becomes more hostile just as prices begin to rise at an accelerated pace, the other is the psychological backdrop to the move, which entails growing pressure on the remaining skeptics and helps investors to rationalize their exposure to overvalued markets.

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Speculative Blow-Offs in Stock Markets – Part 1

Why is the stock market seemingly so utterly oblivious to the potential dangers and in some respects quite obvious fundamental problems the global economy faces? Why in particular does this happen at a time when valuations are already extremely stretched? Questions along these lines are raised increasingly often by our correspondents lately. One could be smug about it and say “it’s all technical”, but there is more to it than that. It may not be...

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The Big Myth

Don Watkins of the Ayn Rand Institute wrote an article, The Myth of Banking Deregulation, to debunk a lie. The lie is that bank regulation is good. That it helped stabilize the economy in the 1930’s. And that deregulation at the end of the century destabilized the economy and caused the crisis of 2008.

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Farewell, Welfare State

The tweet was never sent and never received: “Lying Otto von Bismarck set us up for bankruptcy! What was he thinking? Sad!!” Instead, Mr. Trump said last weekend that, far from trying to curb the promises and cut the costs of the welfare state, he was nearly ready to unveil a plan to replace Obamacare with something better: a plan that would provide “insurance for everybody.”

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Is an Inflation Comeback in the Works?

LOVINGSTON, VIRGINIA – Amid all the sound and fury of the Trump news cycle, hardly anyone noticed. There is a specter haunting this economy. It is the specter of inflation…

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How to Outperform Hedge Funds with Just a Few Trades

In their efforts to beat the market, many investors are spending a lot of time searching for rare undiscovered gems or sophisticated trading rules. There is actually a simpler way. I will show below how one could have beaten the market by a sizable margin over approximately the past 90 years – with only two trades per month, while being invested only one third of the time and without employing any leverage.

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When Trumponomics Meets Abenomics

What will President Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe talk about when they meet later today? Will they gab about what fishing holes the big belly bass are biting at? Will they share insider secrets on what watering holes are serving up the stiffest drinks? [ed. note: when we edited this article for Acting Man, the meeting was already underway]

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Incrementum Advisory Board Meeting, Q1 2017 and Some Additional Reflections

The quarterly meeting of the Incrementum Advisory Board was held on January 11, approximately one month ago. A download link to a PDF document containing the full transcript including charts an be found at the end of this post. As always, a broad range of topics was discussed; although some time has passed since the meeting, all these issues remain relevant.

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The Futility of Predictions

Back in late 2013 I wrote a piece on human nature which was in part inspired by the bullish exuberance exhibited by a MarketWatch article predicting the DJIA at 20,000 in the near term future. Yesterday afternoon, a bit over three years later, that prediction actually became reality and I’m sure the author of that article as well as many other like minded traders popped some champagne in celebration of their awesome ability to predict the future.

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Don’t Blame Trump When the World Ends

There was, indeed, a time when clear thinking and lucid communication via the written word were held in high regard. As far as we can tell, this wonderful epoch concluded in 1936. Everything since has been tortured with varying degrees of gobbledygook.

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With Trump Optimism of Small Business Soars

“You boys know what makes this bird go up? Funding makes this bird go up. That’s right. No bucks, no Buck Rogers.” - Gordon Cooper and Gus Grissom, The Right Stuff (film). Things are looking up for the United States economy in 2017. You can just feel it. Something great is about to happen.

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Policy Makers – Like Generals – Are Busy Fighting The Last War

The Maginot Line formed France's main line of defense on its German facing border from Belgium in the North to Switzerland in the South. It was constructed during the 1930s, with the trench-based warfare of World War One still firmly in the minds of the French generals. The Maginot Line was an absolute success...as the Germans never seriously attempted to attack it's interconnected series of underground fortresses. But the days of static warfare...

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Donald and the Dollar

John Connally, President Nixon’s Secretary of the Treasury, once remarked to the consternation of Europe’s financial elites over America’s inflationary monetary policy, that the dollar “is our currency, but your problem.” Times have certainly changed and it now appears that the dollar has become an American problem.

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US Financial Markets – Alarm Bells are Ringing

When discussing the outlook for so-called “risk assets”, i.e., mainly stocks and corporate bonds (particularly low-grade bonds) and their counterparts on the “safe haven” end of the spectrum (such as gold and government bonds with strong ratings), one has to consider different time frames and the indicators applicable to these time frames.

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