So far the bet has gone their way. Copper has doubled. Gold is up 20%. Stocks markets all over the world are up 60%. Foreign currencies, too, have beaten the dollar.
October 27th, 2009 | Bill Bonner | 2 comments | ContinuedAll Posts Tagged With: "private sector"
Government Debt
And that assumes there is no big increase in interest rates…and that the economy recovers as planned. If either of those things fails to happen, the situation will degrade fast.
October 26th, 2009 | Bill Bonner | 0 comments | Continued
Feds Have Used the Correction to Increase Their Power and Add to Their Wealth
Noooo… We’re talking about a worthy correction…a real correction…a noble and distinguished correction…a correction that can hold its head up in public.
October 14th, 2009 | Bill Bonner | 0 comments | Continued
A Flawed Theory on How to Manage an Economy During a Recession
Your editor spent last night in a discussion with a querulous and drunk Aussie over the stimulus. “It looks like it worked to me,” he said. “Only world economy still growing. GDP up. We’ve got China. Looks like Ruddy and Swanny know what they’re doing. You’re just a hack. You’ve never run a country. And you’re a Yank!”
October 13th, 2009 | Dan Denning | 100 comments | Continued
Is Gold at $1000 a Bargain…Or a Trap?
Barclays Capital says gold could go to $1,500. We don’t know where they got that number. It could go to $15,000 for all we know.
October 9th, 2009 | Bill Bonner | 4 comments | Continued
Government Stimulus Programs Make Life Harder For Banks
Just to recap, government borrowing draws away capital from businesses that might use it to invest in productive projects that generate a real return. What you get in return is higher debt, probably higher interest rates, and people who’ve never really had to earn a paycheck or meet a payroll deciding how to allocate capital. And you still think it’s a good idea?
October 1st, 2009 | Dan Denning | 6 comments | Continued
Proposals Inviting Government to Take Money from You and Give it to Someone Else
Look, there’s nothing wrong with looking for the perfect solution to something, we try to do that all the time. There is one difference though. We favour getting rid of regulations, taxation and compulsion and letting free enterprise and dare we say it, the individual make their own choices.
September 23rd, 2009 | Kris Sayce | 23 comments | Continued
Why Do Men and Women Want Money and Power?
At least as practiced by the leading macroeconomists of our time – such as Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner and Larry Summers. It’s just a show-off sport…the idea is to impress the world with some fancy data-heavy formula…win the Nobel Prize and save the world.
September 9th, 2009 | Bill Bonner | 0 comments | Continued
Household Debt Represents Spending Taken From the Future
But you can’t take an infinite amount from future earnings. You reach a point when the future can’t handle it. As more and more future earnings are absorbed by past consumption, pretty soon there’s not enough left to live on. At some point, so much of earnings are devoted to paying the interest…
August 11th, 2009 | Bill Bonner | 3 comments | Continued
Why Weren’t Economists On Top of This Thing?
Even Alan Greenspan admitted he had “found a flaw” in his own thinking. We will have to imagine the giggles from the back of the room – if anyone had been awake. It was as if Stalin had confessed to being rude to his mother…
August 10th, 2009 | Bill Bonner | 4 comments | Continued
Investors in China Have Learned Nothing From the Crash of ’07-’08
With no barriers to entry, profit margins are always squeezed by competition. And growth is limited too – other builders are always starting up. If the investor paid 40 times earnings, he can only get 2.5% on his money…
July 31st, 2009 | Bill Bonner | 0 comments | Continued
The Challenge of a Balance Sheet Recession
In a world where Austrian School precepts held sway, the dog would be allowed to exhaust itself and start out fresh, facing less-distorted relative price signals that eventually would lead to a more productive set of behaviors. Debts that could not be supported…
July 29th, 2009 | Rob Parenteau | 0 comments | Continued
Job Losses From Private-sector Rose Since Beginning of Recession
My disrespect for “public servants” who make more than their employers (the taxpayers) while doing an obviously poor job aside, in the category of “professional and business services”, that industry lost 122,000 jobs in April.
May 19th, 2009 | Mogambo Guru | 2 comments | Continued
Policy Makers and the Depression
The upside of a severe and painful depression is that the much needed adjust in the economy would finally happen. The flow of credit to productive enterprise and real risk-taking (value creating) activities could resume.
April 23rd, 2009 | Dan Denning | 25 comments | Continued
G20 Was About Big Government Getting Bigger
“Governments know only one way of holding back recession. What do you suppose it is? Yes, the only solution they can think of is to continue the inflation. The ‘boom’ is regenerated with more bank credit and government subsidies. Companies appear to come to life again.”
April 3rd, 2009 | Dan Denning | 6 comments | Continued


