Investment/Trends

Jim Rogers: Gold Mining Stocks Face Two Major Headwinds

"I've been in the investment world a long time and I know that things can stay below the cost of production for years. It takes a long time for people to believe they have to close their mines. It costs money to close a mine, it costs money to re-open a mine, so people are reluctant to close mines. So you can see any commodity staying below the cost of production for a while, especially if it's something like a mine which is expensive to close, and expensive to open. Some people are not going to be able to open mines because of what's happened. But then you're going to eventually have people close mines, and eventually, like I said it's going to work its way out." Continue reading →

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$179,000 Each–In Debt

"Government and household debt has reached $179,000 per person in the U.S. For the past several years, we've heard pundits blathering on about the 'great deleveraging' that's reduced the household debt burden, freeing up American consumers to borrow more, more, more. The Great Deleveraging is shown here--yes, it's that thin slice of debt writeoffs. Debt has since resumed its inexorable rise. That which is unsustainable will go away. That includes debt, malinvestments, currencies, deficits and yes, entire empires." Continue reading →

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Bill Bonner: The End of Low Interest Rates

"A generation has come of age in a time of falling interest rates. When the last turn came, the boomers were just reaching maturity, setting up families, beginning their careers and starting to think about investing. From 1981 until last month, they knew nothing else. A world of falling interest rates is a gentle, forgiving world. But it is a strange world too... It is a world of make-believe, where people pretend they have income they don't really have. What happens when people have debt up the wazoo... and interest rates rise? What happens when the entire economy depends on unprecedented levels of debt at unsustainably low interest rates? That is what we are going to find out." Continue reading →

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Why Serial Asset Bubbles Are Now The New Normal

"Asset bubbles are inevitable when the pool of good investment opportunities is much smaller than the pool of credit-money sloshing around seeking a higher yield. It really is that simple. It's astonishingly easy to create hot money: just create the money in a central bank and then make it available to financiers, investment banks, global corporations and other Financial Elites at near-zero real rates of interest. It's considerably more difficult to create a good investment opportunity: an investment that is worthy of the risk must have a sound base in fundamentals such as cash flow, return on investment, etc." Continue reading →

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Foreclosures are the Solution, Not the Problem

"The majority of those foreclosed on and who sold short would have become clean potential buyers in 3 to 7 years ensuring a housing recovery was not only on deck but would be 'durable'. Millions of legacy HELOCs and HELOANs preventing folks from rebuying real estate indefinitely would have been exterminated making millions more potential buyers within 2 to 5 years. Bottom line, history will not be kind to loan mods and workouts. It will show that modifications, anti-foreclosure laws, banks protecting their HELOC assets — in general, unabated can-kicking — was responsible for housing to remain in a depression for years longer than it would have." Continue reading →

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About That Supposed Correlation of the U.S. Dollar and Gold….

"One of the most widely accepted truisms in what passes for our financial media is that the dollar and gold are correlated: when the dollar weakens, gold rises, and when gold rises, the dollar declines. Nice, except this vaunted correlation isn't remotely visible in the charts. Conclusion: there is no correlation between gold and the U.S. dollar index. Not even close.The two move independently; any apparent correlation is semi-random signal noise. They are not on a simplistic see-saw." Continue reading →

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Book Review: Damn Right! Biography of Charlie Munger

"There are huge advantages for an individual to get into a position where you make a few great investments and just sit back and wait: You’re paying less to brokers. You’re listening to less nonsense. And if it works, the governmental tax system gives you an extra 1, 2 or 3 percentage points per annum compounded. And you think that most of you are going to get that much advantage by hiring investment counselors and paying them 1% to run around, incurring a lot of taxes on your behalf? Lots of luck." Continue reading →

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My History With the Infinite Banking Concept (IBC)

"In this article, I will summarize Nelson Nash’s Infinite Banking Concept (IBC) for the novice, but I will do so in the context of my own experience in learning about it. Thus this article serves several purposes. First, I hope it clarifies for Austrian / libertarian readers why I became so interested in the economics of life insurance. Yet I also hope it further explains to people already in the IBC community why I think the IBC Practitioner’s Program is such an important component in bringing this message to a wider audience. Finally, it will hopefully prove useful as a general introduction to IBC for any reader, told in the style of 'one guy’s journey.'" Continue reading →

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