» john rubino

The in-laws own a gas station in Miami that they’ve wanted to sell for years. But they dithered when the market was hot and ended up being stuck with it when interest evaporated in 2009. Lately, though, the phone has begun to ring again. It’s not exactly a feeding frenzy but real offers are comi...

Getting Europe’s mainstream politicians and appointed technocrats to agree to bailouts and austerity was actually the easy part. The real challenge for these guys will be holding onto their jobs — and preserving the deals they’ve cut — in upcoming elections. Voters, it seems, aren’t convin...

For years now, US government bonds have looked like terrible investments, what with those trillion-dollar deficits and multiple wars and all. But Treasuries just kept rising, earning their owners nice returns and making their critics seem like financial illiterates who didn’t know a AAAA credit wh...

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...