Archive - Mar 24, 2011 - Blog entry

Has Canada become the world's largest subprime lender?

I warned, in detail, that Research in Motion was a strong short due to waning market share and margin compression in January. RIM warns of the EXACT SAME risks as it lowers guidance earlier today. For all of those optimists in the stock, this is just the beginning - for RIM and its competitors as well. Mobile computing will soon be a commodity business like desktop computers.

I know that many deflationists believe that we cannot experience hyperinflation in the US due to our obscene debt levels. The belief here is that all the money thrown into the US financial system will be swallowed by another round of debt deflation. The problem with this belief is that it doesn’t understand how currency crises work. Inflation occurs when a currency falls in value relative to other currencies. And as noted by other astute commentators, hyperinflation occurs when a currency is abandoned all together.

The US Dollar's inflationary death spiral continues. We've now taken out the 2010 low leaving only two more lines of support before we're in completely uncharted territory. At its current rate of collapse, the US Dollar will do this within the next 3-4 months. This means the greenback will break into a new all-time lows by 2H11, which will precipitate the coming inflationary collapse.

How I learned to stop worrying and love the Black Swan...

With all due respect to that Nassim Taleb dude who popularized the term “Black Swasn”, Black Swan events are both overrated and the term is sloppily bandied about by those who may not be putting the requisite thought into just how utilitarian the knowledge of Black Swans actually are. Since you can’t accurately predict, nor back test against, nor adequately hedge against such events, exactly what good is a Black Swan discussion. Well, I can answer that question.

The “Hunt Brother High” is within reach. The total demand for silver today is the same as it was in 1980, when their corning drove it to $50/ounce.
Investment demand is overwhelming industrial demand by a large margin. Should I let target creep take hold and raise my long term forecast to $100? That might be really insane! (SLV), (AGQ), (CDE), (SLW).

A little closer to home....

GBPUSD has made a strong move back into the neutral zone after some strong selling yesterday. EURUSD made a similar move but remains in the long zone even though it has dropped back considerably. We have a slew of PMI data coming out of the EuroZone from 4am EST onwards. Retail Sales out of the UK are likely to have a strong impact on retail positioning, Core Durable Goods Orders at 8:30 am EST is the big number out of the US.