All Posts Tagged With: "economy"

The newly-declared end-date to the recession also confirms what many had suspected: The 2007-9 recession was the deepest on record since the Great Depression, at least in terms of job losses. From December 2007 to June 2009…

Should you buy gold? Again, it depends on what you’re trying to do. Here at The Daily Reckoning, we don’t encourage speculation. So if you buy gold in the hope of making a lot of money, you’re on your own. We don’t recommend it. Gold could go up…or down.

Our dear readers who bought gold back in 1999 have made about 4 times their money. This year alone it is up 15% – a very respectable return. Most of that has come as a result of paper currencies going down. Investors are buying gold to protect themselves.

In practice, free information turned out to be worth no more than people paid for it…and the dot.com revolution blew up in January 2000…leaving only a handful of survivors (who have done very well, thank you.) In our view, the stock market has been in a bear trend ever since…

The Nobel Prize committee has never withdrawn a prize. It might want to consider it. In Tuesday’s New York Times, prizewinner in economics, Paul Krugman reveals either that he knows nothing about economics…or that there is nothing worth knowing in it. We’re beginning to think it’s the latter.

The next few days should be telling ones for both gold and equities. Gold has come off its new highs. But you haven’t seen a huge amount of selling either. As our friend Phil Anderson pointed out the other night, you often see two to three days of lower closes after a new high. That gives you a good time to enter into a position.But so far, September hasn’t been the historical disaster we’ve come to expect. Mind you, it’s early. Yet outside some whisperings of capital raisings by major European banks…

Japan was the world’s most admired economy in the ’80s. Then it was the world’s most despised economy in the ’90s. By 1995, economists pointed their fingers and laughed – the world’s most admired businessman had lost his left shoe. But now, much of the world is barefoot.

It’s the same story, different day (SSDD). That is, nothing much has been revealed overnight to cause us to change our view that you’re investing in the midst of a long-term depression. Most of the positive GDP data coming out globally is backward looking. It doesn’t tell you much about the future. It is worth noting that a story in yesterday’s Financial Review showed that prices for coking coal have followed iron ore and coal prices down.