Tag Archive: On Economy

Wealth Management Products: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Wealh Management Products issuance equaled $1.1 trillion in 2015, a nearly 75% jump on the prior year and equaling 40% of the total growth in credit. Almost one-third of the WMP were bought by credit institutions for inclusion in other WMP – WMP Squared!

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The Trump Risk: Will President Trump Trigger a Recession?

“The economic consequences of a Trump win would be severe,” claims Mr. Summers in the headline. But he has no way of knowing what the consequences would be, let alone if they would be severe. Would they be worse than if Ms. Clinton were elected? No one knows.

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Free Money Leaves Everyone Poorer

  Destroying Lives BALTIMORE – A dear reader reminded us of the comment, supposedly made by Groucho Marx: “A free lunch? You can’t afford a free lunch.”   Groucho dispensing valuable advice Photo via imdb.com   He was responding to last week’s Diary ...

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Claudio Grass Interviews Felix Zulauf

Government Intervention is Making Things Worse. Claudio Grass, the CEO of Global Gold, has recently interviewed legendary Swiss fund manager Felix Zulauf.

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Arrant Star Trek Socialism

  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

  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

  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

  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

  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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How Elon Musk Helps Fools to Part Ways with Their Money

  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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Sloppy Decisions at Greenlight Capital and Pershing Square

  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?

  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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Is the Economy a Machine?

  A Science Goes Astray Human beings have a strong tendency to look for patterns. The natural sciences have shown that the universe is governed by laws, the effects of which are observable and measurable in an objective manner. Mostly, anyway — there...

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Are Investors Idiots?

  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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Revolution at the Ranch

  Alarming News BALTIMORE, Maryland – An alarming email came on Tuesday from our ranch in Argentina: “Bad things going on… We thought we had the originarios problem settled. Not at all. They just invaded the ranch.”   Originarios on the march… Photo ...

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How to Maximize Economic Potential

The fundamental problem facing today’s economy is the barefaced contempt governments the world over have for the free exchange of goods and services and private stewardship of property. What it is government’s think they are doing with their destructive fiscal and monetary policies is unclear. But what is crystal clear is the scrambled disorder modern day economic policies have wrought.

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The Fatal Conceit

Bonner shows that Hayek's Fatal Conceit is valid today: central economic planning is literally impossible – there can be no centrally planned rational economy. Individual planning is distinct from central planning, in that the many individual plans pursued by self-interested individuals mesh and create a spontaneous order.

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Retirement Torpedoes and Democracy

Bonner compares Total credit market debt, federal government debt and GDP – an economy running on debt, and now running on empty.

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The World’s 100 Most Influential Hacks, Yahoos and Monkey Shiners

  Hacks and Has-Beens NORMANDY, France – What has happened to TIME magazine? Henry Luce, who started TIME – the first weekly news magazine in the U.S. – would be appalled to see what it has become.   Time cover featuring the sunburned mummy heading t...

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Corporate Tax Receipts Reflect Economic Slowdown

We compare Tax Receipts against the Stock Market. It becomes obvious that tax receipts have slowed down recently. And so should the performance of the stock market.

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