» john rubino

Bloomberg is reporting on the rising number of hedge funds shorting gold:   Gold Bear Bets Reach Record as Soros Cuts Holdings Hedge-fund managers are making the biggest ever bet against gold as billionaire George Soros sold holdings last quarter and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. predicted more decl...

Based on both recent history and mainstream economic theory the past few years should not have been possible. When you cut interest rates to near-zero, run deficits of 10% of GDP and buy up every government bond in sight with newly created currency, you get a boom, end of story. That’s just the wa...

One of the lessons that gold bugs are learning, in the most painful way possible, is that you can’t trade a manipulated market. When big players with regulatory immunity can move an asset’s price — and can see resistance/support levels and moving averages just as clearly as anyone else — sma...

First-quarter GDP came in at an annualized rate of 2.5% last week, which is not terrible as growth goes these days (Japan and most of the Eurozone countries would love to be doing that well). But dig a little deeper and the picture gets darker. Here’s a summary from the Consumer Metrics Institute...

Marc Faber of the Gloom Boom Doom Report was interviewed by Bloomberg on Friday, and of course topic number one was the brutal takedown of gold. Not all that surprisingly, he likes the resulting buying opportunity and expects “a major low in gold within the next two weeks.” More interesting ...

For a decade or so leading up to the 2009 crash, one of the highlights of Doug Noland’s Prudent Bear Credit Bubble column was his quarterly dissection of the Federal Reserve’s Z.1 Flow of Funds report. This was pure finance-geek porn showing ridiculous, parabolic, trillion-dollar increases in ...

To understand how close many US universities are to catastrophic failure, let’s start with the story of Robert (not his real name, but all the rest is true). He’s 19, a freshman at a state university, a smart kid with eclectic interests but no sense of what he wants to be when he grows up. His ...

The US economy stalled in the 4th quarter, but the analysis that accompanied the latest (slightly positive) GDP revision seemed to imply that the reasons for the weakness – a drawdown of inventories and lower defense spending – would be reversed out in coming months, making 2013 a pretty good ye...

Running a pension fund used to be one of the easier jobs in finance. The money came in steadily and predictably from member contributions, and you invested it conservatively (in investment grade bonds and blue chip stocks) to meet a modest annual return target of around 8%. It was cook-book money ma...

It’s amazing what you can get used to if it just goes on long enough. Everyone with a family has experienced this personally, but it’s also true at the societal level, where one decade’s impossibility becomes the next’s normal. Not so long ago, for instance, interest rates signified the am...

The Eurozone meltdown has sent capital pouring into (temporarily) safe haven currencies like the US dollar, which rose by nearly 12% between October 2011 and August 2012. This sounds like a good thing for the US but it’s not, because US multinationals lose big when the dollar pops. Assume, for ...

The short version of the Long Wave story is that we’re emotional creatures with limited memories. For as long as there have been markets we’ve been passing through the same sequence of mental states, beginning with anxious conservatism in the aftermath of hard times, followed by cautious optimis...