All Posts Tagged With: "money"

And so begins yet another day where we have no idea what the world will bring us. But let’s have a crack anyway. At the top of the list of today’s thoughts is whether a contraction in global credit means there will be fewer good investment opportunities. Without an ocean of credit to float on, good businesses will have to sink or swim on their own merits. But first, here is something that looks like it might be good news for the trader types.

Boomers are cutting back? Of course boomers are cutting back! They’re getting ready for retirement. They need to save some money. It was loony to think you could finance your retirement out of the increases in your house’s value. Who were you going to sell the house to? Boomers were the biggest buyers of houses.

The stock market took a tumble yesterday. The Dow fell 265 points after investors had a chance to ruminate about the Fed’s latest action. It wasn’t what the Fed did or said that discouraged investors. It was what it didn’t say and what it didn’t do. It didn’t say, for example, that it was going to “crank up the printing presses”.

The U.S. dollar is falling because it is fundamentally dishonest money. But rather than prove that today, we’ll begin with a man sleeping soundly a camp cot at a mining site in Botswana and show why his visit – and the opportunity he was investigating – is tied directly to the dollar’s dishonesty.The man is Dr. Alex Cowie, or Dr. Stock as we call him around the offices when he’s here and not chasing up some geologist over coffee in the CBD. You may know him as the editor of Diggers and Drillers.

Alright then. So yesterday we made a claim that the Fed has ways of causing inflation in the same way that the Gestapo has ways of making you talk. But it was merely a claim. We didn’t prove it. Today, we offer incontrovertible proof that the Federal government of the United States intends to inject money directly into U.S. households using an obscure provision of the recently passed Dodd-Frank shemozzle.

It appears that the neo-Keynesians Krugman and Wolf are right about at least one thing. Cutting government spending while the private sector is de-leveraging is a hard way to go. What happens is that as the feds cut back it reduces income to the private sector, which is itself in cutback mode. This then causes tax revenues to fall – which increases the deficit…

High taxes are the main one. Low employment rates are another. Who works when you get your money for nothing and your cheques for free from Centre Link? Wait a minute. Low employment in Australia? Yup, “Australia’s employment rate – the percentage of the population with a job – ranks only 20th of the 27 rich OECD countries for prime-age workers” reports Tim Colebatch at The Age.