Housing is hot again, but lately it’s been overshadowed by flashier bubbles in government debt, tech stocks and possibly cryptocurrencies. Still, the warning signs are spreading. Today’s Wall Street Journal, for instance, reports that homeowners are back to using their houses as ATMs: Homeowners Are Again Pocketing Cash as They Refinance Properties Americans refinancing their […]
Breaking News And Best Of The Web
Trump foreign tour is eventful. Q1 GDP revised upward but still weak. UK “furious” with US over Manchester terrorist attack leaks. Trump son-in-law under investigation for Russian Ties. Bitcoin soars, plunges. US stocks recover from recent plunge, gold and silver modestly higher. Best Of The Web Will the crazy global debt bubble ever end? […]
Top Ten Videos — May 28
Chris Martenson on why the stock market is a speculative bubble. Ron Paul on why terrorist attacks are blowback for our past policy mistakes. Is bitcoin a lion or a shark? Will it continue to steal gold’s thunder? Classic Peter Schiff video.
Really Bad Ideas, Part 2: Giving Up Without Admitting It
Doing the right thing is hard for both individuals and their governments. Name the goal – maintaining a healthy weight, paying off high-interest credit cards, keeping debt-to-GDP at reasonable levels, whatever – and with each missed deadline or broken promise success recedes further into the distance. And the temptation grows to just give up and […]
Is This Bitcoin’s Fatal Flaw?
Bitcon has been rocketing higher lately, as it gains widespread official approval and more people figure out how to use it. As the first of its kind to emerge, bitcoin has become synonymous with “cryptocurrency”. But lately it’s been joined by a lot of others – which together now account for more than half of […]
You’d Think We’d Be A Little More Worried…
By now everyone with an Internet connection is aware of the “ransomware” attack that shut down hundreds of thousands of computers over the weekend. The fact that the onslaught is just beginning — as the military-grade hacking tools developed by the NSA and recently leaked are weaponized by hackers and released into the wild — […]
Really Bad Ideas, Part 1: Modern Monetary Theory
The past century has been an orgy of experimentation. We tried fascism, which initially looked good to some before (literally) crashing and burning. We tried communism, which looked great to many before killing millions and withering away. Fiat currency and fractional reserve banking, meanwhile, still make sense to most economists and politicians but seem to […]
Is Canada The Next Hot Money Victim?
One of the interesting things about the Great Recession was how Canada’s financial system sailed through it largely unscathed. Its banks were regulated wisely and behaved prudently, its citizens avoided the extreme stupidity of their credit-addicted neighbors to the south, and its government refrained from doubling its debt every eight years. It certainly looked like […]
The Least Explicable Bubble
Of all the mini-bubbles now inflating out there, maybe the least explicable is the race among emerging market companies to borrow dollars. This has gotten them – and their governments — in huge trouble so many times in the past (see the Mexican default of 1982 and the Asian contagion of 1997) that you’d think […]
Misunderstanding GDXJ: Why It’s Actually Great News For Junior Miners
Something extraordinarily good for junior precious metals miners just happened. But for some reason it’s being misinterpreted as a bad thing. Here’s the general story: A Small-Cap Gold Mining ETF Streaks Lower As Big Index Change Looms (Investors.com) – Mining stocks blazed a bright trail of returns since the start of 2016 as gold saw […]
The Housing Bubble Is Back
Last week I ran into a friend whom I’d been worrying about. He’s a real estate appraiser and his work had been drying up as interest rates rose and homeowners stopped refinancing their mortgages. But now he’s back to being happily swamped because instead of refinancing, everyone is buying — often, he says, for above […]
Don’t Let This Happen To You
Some lives were changed recently: Gold Treasure Found Inside A British Piano (Mercury News) — British officials say they’ve been unable to trace the rightful heirs to a trove of gold coins found stashed inside a piano and worth a “life-changing” amount of money. The Shropshire school that owns the piano and the tuner who […]
After The Crash*, Part 2: Digital And Regenerative Medicine
For most people, the doctor visit hasn’t changed in decades. Same physical waiting rooms, same paper forms to fill out, same slow, expensive tests and marginally-effective, maximally-invasive treatments. But that’s about to change, as a wave of new technologies drag medicine into the 21st century. Among the most interesting: Digitized research. Instead of laboriously searching […]
Why We’re Ungovernable, Part 17: Europe Gets Its Doomsday Scenario
The rise of French far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen has made a lot of people nervous since, among many other things, she’s in favor of leaving the eurozone, which would pretty much end the common currency. But since polling has shown her making the two-person run-off round but then losing to a mainstream candidate, […]
China Starting To Resemble Bernie Madoff
Audible.com just released a new show on Bernie Madoff (Ponzi Supernova, available for free to subscribers) that explains how the world’s biggest financial scam was enabled by banks and hedge funds who were making so much money that they chose to ignore obvious red flags. Which sounds a lot like today’s China, Inc. Here, for […]
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