One of my favorite commentators is Rich Karlgaard, Publisher of Forbes. You can follow him in print every bi-weekly issue, as well as catch him doing the talking head circuit on the cable news shows.
By being based in Silicon Valley, he maintains his pulse on the new economy…while keeping his jaundiced eye on the decaying, […]
The signals on inflation are at odds with each other.
On the one hand, as measured by the consumer price index, prices are mildly deflationary.
This is the metric that determines price adjustments on everything from semi-annual U.S. Government Inflation Protected Bond interest rates to annual Social Security cost of living adjustments.
Speaking of which, for the first […]
I’ve gotten in the habit of listening to audio books while I’m tooling around running errands.
And one of the best that I’ve recently listened to is “Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse” by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
I recommend it without the […]
The dumbing down of the economy has just registered a new low.
The CFTC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission) has just reversed its finding of last year, and has determined that speculators and traders are to blame for the spike in oil prices.
In a related discovery, the new activist administration has just announced that they have conclusively […]
When the vocabulary of economics is exhausted, we must turn to other disciplines…today that would be medicine.
“Idiopathic,” as defined by Wikipedia, is an adjective used primarily in medicine-meaning “arising spontaneously or from an obscure or unknown cause.”
In plain English, this is the catch all diagnosis MDs reach for when they haven’t got a clue as […]
Now that we’ve mastered the alphabet, a brief history of Wall Street’s zoological taxonomy…
Allegedly, bull markets got their name from the habit of the bull in tossing its victim upward after impaling them on its horns. Your basic- losing matador, winning bull - metaphor.
While bear markets were named for the ursine habit of forcing their […]
Sometimes it helps to reduce complex outcomes to more easily grasped symbols.
Which is how we ended up with the latest shorthand…letters of the alphabet used as symbols to describe the shape of eventual economic recovery.
The rules are simple enough. A downward sloping trajectory refers to a contraction in economic output…ditto…in reverse…for the upward sloping sign.
1. […]
Not all of television is a vast wasteland.
Winston Churchill once famously described the Balkans as an area that produced more history than they could consume locally. World War I being a case in point.
Which basically sums up my impression of the magnitude and pace of change that began with the Bear Stearns bailout in March […]
