Question: “Europe along with Japan look like they are preparing to be flushed down the toilet,” would you anticipate their equity markets to be flushed down the toilet as well.  (Not necessarily a crash, but a very large correction). ANSWER: NO! This is part of the Sovereign Debt Crisis. I was speaking politically ONLY – […]

Well, the hate mail has started regarding gold and as usual, I get all the arrows. Sorry, but gold is still a market. It rises and falls according to supply and demand and right now the market is overbought. When I was given a institutional conference in Tokyo, an individual bribed his way in. He […]

The numbers for Japan in December would imply on the surface that capital inflows took place rather than outflows yet the yen declined. There are serious problems with the way  governments track capital/trade flows. They do not actually monitor anything but cash movement. This is a throw back to the fixed exchange era when if […]

The questions about gold v the Dow seem to be relentless. Here seems to be the number one question people ask. “Are you saying Gold & the Dollar and Dow can rise together?” Most of the nonsense about gold are sales pitches designed to convince people to buy. They far too often are not well […]

If anyone thinks that the Fed does not know in advance what is happening with the numbers, well you must be from another planet. Just hours after the Commerce Department reported that there was the first decline in quarterly GDP in 3-1/2 years, the Federal Reserve announced it was maintaining its policy of near-zero interest […]

There are two distinct trends that we have to divide and conquer to fully understand what we are dealing with (1) Parking capital and (2) Investing Capital The motives behind each are totally different and this goes in part to also the question of the “reserve” status of the dollar. There is the dollar as […]

Fischer Black and Myron Scholes won the Nobel Prize for Economics. Scholes was  involved with Long-Term Capital Management that blew up on that formula. The fund, which started operations with $1 billion of investor capital, was extremely successful in the first years, with annualized returns of over 40%. However, following the 1997 East Asian financial […]

The failure to raise the debt ceiling would not be negative regarding the creditworthiness of the US. It would signal that politics is becoming so intractable that a deadlock on the political front is reflecting the inability to confront any real debt issues. Policymaking has become insane with critical bills being stuffed with things nobody […]

I really do not understand why people insist that HYPERINFLATION must take place. That ASSUMES government will print to meet its unfunded obligations rather than just change laws and fail to meet promises. They are cutting entitlements already. Yes Rome debased its currency to the point that its worth was 1/50th of its former value. […]

Anyone looking to lower your interest rate on a fixed mortgage had better start now. The paper work required by banks is currently insane and the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. It is often taking people 6 months to get approvals. Interest rates will rise, so there is no time like the present […]