Archive - Dec 30, 2015

After looking over all the figures, it seems as if something broke in the U.S. Silver Market this year. By that, we mean the normal supply and demand forces no longer make sense.

Swiss army chief André Blattmann warned, in a Swiss newspaper article on Sunday, the risks of social unrest in Europe are soaring. Recalling the experience of 1939/1945, Blattman fears the increasing aggression in public discourse is an explosively hazardous situation, and advises the Swiss people to arm themselves and warns that the basis for Swiss prosperity is "being called into question."

America is being destroyed by problems that are unaddressed. Unbridled greed, short-term in nature, will continue to drive America into the ground.

Perhaps mom and pop investors should show the following chart to their financial advisors, who directly or indirectly work for these institutions, and ask them: why should they be buying, when the counterparty they are buying from is, most likely, this very same financial advisor?

The prospect that the leaders of our monetary politburo are about to be tarred and feathered by economic reality might be satisfying enough if it led to the repudiation of Keynesian central planning and a thorough housecleaning at the Fed. Unfortunately, it will also mean that tens of millions of retail investors and 401k holders will be taken to the slaughterhouse for the third time this century. And this time the Fed is out of dry powder, meaning retail investors will never recover as they did after 2002 and 2009.

With yet another false-dawn of crude prices blowing in the wind of cash-flow generation desperation, we thought it an appropriate time for a bigger picture glance at the state of the carnage in crude...

Politics - especially elections - creates a system that brings out the worst in people. It poisons relationships. It pulls us in as spectators who stand agog at a completely inauthentic show of national politics (over which we have virtually no power). We end up mostly ignoring the local issues over which we could have considerably more influence. As a consequence, an entire nation falls under a particular kind of spell.

The last two years rents have been rising primarily due to supply and demand issues.

In this day and age it seems like almost everything is disposable, and many employers have found that they can make a lot more money if they have a workforce that can be turned on and off like a faucet. In America today, there are more than 17 million “independent workers”, and they represent a bigger share of the workforce than ever before.

Between these two banking systems alone, you’ve got the makings of a global financial crisis at least on par with 2008. 

On the heels of a 59% plunge in new Class 8 orders, we get a fresh take on freight transportation from Morgan Stanley and as you might expect, the picture is most assuredly not pretty. The bank's TLFIs are bumping along at their lowest levels since the crisis for flatbed, hot van, and refrigerated, suggesting the malaise is widespread.

Progressives are often good people with good intentions. However, modern Progressivism has evolved into something so shapeless and amorphous as to amount to little more than a belief in “things that sound nice.” Simply out, everything is now a taxpayer-funded "right."