Archive - 2010 - Blog entry

Is it time to offer a human sacrifice to atone for the financial crisis? You don’t give an arsonist a medal for putting out the fire. How the smartest kid from rural Dillon, South Carolina saved the world. When do we find out how smart Bernanke really is? Nothing less than the fate of the free world depends on the answer.

One of Canada's largest pension funds, the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, is refocusing its priorities as it tries to come back from an underwhelming investment performance...

What a terrible day. Rained and blew like hell. I stayed inside and solved part of the problem of the deficit.

Few people realize that home prices in the United States have only risen in a sustained manner twice in the last 116 years...

...The general public seems to believe the bottom in housing has arrived; however, I believe no one will make any money on their real estate investments for the next decade. There may be an exception or two with a fixer-upper or a foreclosure, but buying a home for your primary residence under typical circumstances will be a net loser.

~ Information Technology, Social Media & the Structural Integrity of the Internet in the 21st Century ~ after China got caught with its hand in Google's POP3 Port 995 cookie jar, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton fired THE first salvo in what will likely prove itself to be the terrain of WW III ~ the digital battlefield. This highlight is intended to set the stage for a short-series that will delve deeper into the multivariate 'strategery' of the issue du jour ~ China, Computers & Freedom in the 21st Century.

I thought the readers of ZeroHedge would like to see excerpts from the note we put out for clients of the IRA Advisory Service earlier today. Despite the confidence of Treasury Secretary Tim Geither, who is well known for his keen political instincts, the Bernanke nomination is far from a done deal.

The SPX is going to plunge 10-20%, Treasury bond interest rates are going to soar (TBT), and gold (GLD) has peaked out. Then brace yourself for the Big One in 2013. (SPX), (TBT), (GLD), (FXA), (UNG), (WHEAT), (CORN), (SOYBEANS)

The difference between the world when Volcker was Fed chairman and today is the end of Glass Steagall. Instead of bailing out simple lenders, the Fed now faces the task of managing and saving giant securities and securitization platforms that are too big to manage in a rational fashion. Don't fool yourself into thinking that JPM chief Jamie Dimon or any CEO of a TBTF bank has the slightest idea what is really happening within their enterprise.

The timing and haste of the newly proposed Volcker Rule by Obama has drawn criticism that this is simply a transparent attempt at populism in light of the Dems Massachusetts defeat. Moreover, it certainly does not address the more dire issue of the Middle America – jobs.

Bankers are destroying Capitalism. Unfortunately, most Westerners won’t realize this until five years from now, when the middle class has been forcibly relegated to the ranks of the poor. And this isn’t just a situation that will afflict America but it will likely afflict Japan and many countries in the EU such as the UK, Spain, and Greece just to name a few.

Whenever I read that pension fund consultants are "being inundated with requests," my antennas go up, as does the hair behind my neck!

Make no mistake about it, investors remain poorly positioned to weather a sell off.

A strong RMB will unleash a world of change, and much for the positive that many are underestimating.

Forgive me for a bit of a rant. I'm pissed. Any talk of addressing the problems at America's government mortgage lenders has been put on hold for another year. Why? Politics. The worst possible reason.

It's been about 6 months since we’ve had an extensive discussion of China’s solar market, so let's catch up on the major developments in the space. Before detailing 5 key points that will help crash the Crude Oil market in 2010 ~ let’s kick-off with an excellent video created by ClimateWorks ....