The big dogs are starting to pile into gold…
….as the world’s welfare democracies continue to trash their paper currencies by running their printing presses overtime.
This includes some of the smartest investors who had the foresight to bet against the sub-prime bubble. See the Wall Street Journal’s, “Bearish Big Investors Catch Gold Bug“(3/9/09, page CI).
So why […]
Here we go again.
In our collective zeal to lighten the burden on residential mortgage holders, we risk the hazard of doing permanent damage for future borrowers.
First, some background.
We allow banks to charge higher rates on credit card debt, because it is unsecured. The banks know that a large contingent of borrowers will never repay, […]
Be careful of what you wish for…you may just get it.
The so-called stimulus bill has passed. All three of them.
It started with the TARP
Whose dimensions were scribbled out on the back of an envelope by for the former Treasury Secretary, as a percentage of GDP.
And the pols and the public fell for it. […]
Q. What’s the best way to knock off a bank?
A. Make sure it’s an inside job.
We are on the brink of a once-in-a-generation — maybe once in a lifetime — buyers’ market for single family homes, sometime between mid-2009 and the end of 2010.
The confluence of policy initiatives and bare-knuckle economics will make […]
Now that the government is deeply investing in our financial infrastructure…let’s see what happens when this impulse is carried to extremes.
There are two ways a nation state can repudiate its debt obligations.
The accepted protocol is to tolerate a slow and steady erosion of the host currency. This allows the debtor state to borrow real […]
Main Street Carries The Blame Too
We must stop demonizing Wall Street and Washington for the mess we are in.
Take the worst policy decisions ever, and I can promise you…that it must have seemed like a very good idea at the time.
Home Ownership as “The American Dream”
We have a deeply ingrained belief in the value and […]
De-leveraging is the force driving market prices lower.
Don’t be overly impressed with its fancy finance-geek name. It’s just an economic term for selling off assets to pay down debt.
The Macro View
It’s at the core of the $700 billion rescue package. The lenders’ capital base is too small to support the weight of all […]
Let’s see how the IRS is doing this year handling refunds.
According to Martin Vaughan’s article in the Wall Street Journal (9/9/09, D5) here are the results.
Filing your return online, and providing routing information for direct deposit to the taxpayer’s bank account…an average of just 10 days. And for some lucky taxpayers as soon […]
