» Dollar Collapse

It looks like Greece will get its debt restructuring, which presumably delays its collapse by a few months. So now the spotlight shifts to the other functionally bankrupt eurozone countries which have no choice but to demand the same deal. Portugal, by general consensus, is next in line. It hasn’t...

If investing seems harder than it used to, you’re not imagining things. U.S. stocks are down from a decade ago, the gold/silver miners haven’t kept up with the underlying metals, and though Treasury bonds have done pretty well, only a lunatic would count on them going forward. And now that MF Gl...

Greece has been out of the spotlight for a couple of weeks, which means it’s past due for another market-rattling announcement. And sure enough, today we find out that its economy is shrinking even faster than expected: Greece Apparently Even Worse Off Than Realized, Hitting Euro, Stocks This fle...

Europe’s leaders have convened another summit meeting that will, they promise, put all the break-up speculation to bed once and for all. But the ideas that were floated pre-meeting are, um, logically challenged. Consider this excerpt from a recent Wall Street Journal article: The Pitfalls of Merko...

The pattern is by now so familiar that it deserves a place beside other technical indicators like moving averages and Fibonacci retracements. It begins with part or all of the global economy appearing to implode under its five-decade accumulation of debt. The public sector/central bank nexus respo...

The people buying bonds issued by Italy and Spain are clearly looking past the dysfunctional balance sheets and focusing on Germany’s reluctance to let a major PIIGS country default. So an Italian bond, in the mind of the market, becomes a German bond. But this sword cuts both ways. If European d...

The Consumer Metrics Institute, a consultancy with a good track record of year-ahead economic predictions, is out with its analysis of 3rd quarter GDP. By and large it’s pretty grim. Some excerpts follow without comment, since the main points pretty much speak for themselves: In their second est...

This week all eyes are on Greece and Italy, which is reasonable since they’re likely to be pretty entertaining. But as incredible as it sounds, PIIGS country sovereign debt might not be the biggest banking-system threat on the immediate horizon. It turns out that the largest European banks have he...

As Europe grinds out yet another doomed banking system rescue plan, it might be helpful to examine the underlying assumption, which is that we need these big banks. Do we really? If Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, Crédit Lyonnais and five or six of their peers ceased to exist toni...

U.S. Consumer Credit Fell $9.5 Billion in August.   August marked the largest drop in consumer credit in almost a year according to a statement released by the Federal Reserve on Sunday. The $9.5 billion decrease follows an $11.9 billion increase the previous month. The Feds also announced that non...

One upon a time, the US was a place where police came when you called, a basic safety net caught those who fell on hard times, and a lifetime of work was rewarded with a decent retirement. A First World country, in other words. To be born here was to win life’s lottery. But apparently this was an ...

Gold and silver have been pretty much the best things to own during the past few years. But the mining stocks…not so much. This is no secret, though why the miners are underperforming is a subject of debate. You hear about high energy prices (though oil is way down lately) and potential nationaliz...