Don’t get fleeced with the rest of them
Some stories just have to be repeated. Like the one from Sweden that tells of a collapsing floor during a Weight Watchers weigh-in. As twenty or so dieters filled the room to measure the fruits of their effort, the floor beneath them rumbled then failed.
Priceless irony.
It proves Americans, especially us East Coasters, aren’t the only ones with size-management issues.
As the markets sink under their own weight today, I cannot help but think much the same is taking place on Wall Street. The equities market can only hold so much fat before it gives up support and comes crashing down.
I rarely use technical analysis as a primary analytical tool, but I will use the help of charts and lines to…
How to Predict the Price of Gold
Jeff Clark, Editor of Casey’s Gold & Resource Report, discusses the techniques of tracking gold:
While the dollar is likely to bounce at some point, making gold correct, the long-term fate of the dollar has already dried in cement. If the dollar were simply to return to its March 2008 low of 71.30 next year – a 4.6% drop from current levels – this would imply a rise in gold of 22.5% and a price of about $1,478 an ounce.
The long-term scenario is more dramatic. If you believe the dollar will lose half its value from current levels, this would imply a gold price around $4,164. If you believe it will lose 75% of its value, gold would reach about $5,642. Doug Casey has called for a $5,000 gold price; if he’s right, guess what that implies for the dollar?
My first prediction for 2010
Baltimore — (TFN): Do you think Rupert Murdoch and his multi-billion-dollar buggy whip factory is getting nervous? Unless the prince of print media single-handedly transforms an industry, his empire will come crashing down.
This story goes well beyond Murdoch’s decision to start charging for his company’s online news content. It is a debate about monopolies and the government’s role in protecting or destroying them.
In case you missed it, there is a great editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal by the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt (scroll down for link). In the piece, the doctor doesn’t necessarily lash out at Murdoch and his recent attacks aimed at Google, but the desire to call Murdoch a crybaby is obvious.
Schmidt makes it clear that…
The Next Depression: It’s worse than they think
“Beyond the Crisis… With most of the world’s economies officially out of recession, the FT launches a series examining the legacy of worst global economic crisis since the 1930s,” says the FT. But according to the figures below the headline, the crisis wasn’t so bad. The US economy walked backward only 3.5%. Now, it’s making progress again.
The FT editors should keep their eyes on the road. The ‘recession’ did more damage than they think. And it isn’t over… There’s more trouble ahead.
What’s better than gold? Anything!
Baltimore — (TFN): One good thing about kids is they are predictable. Give them five bucks and say they’ve got just one hour to spend it or it goes into their savings account and can bet another five bucks the cash will be spent by minute 59.
It’s the same way for politicians. Give them some cash and they’ll have it spent in no time flat, even if they can’t find anything worth buying.
Take, for example, the infamous Troubled Asset Relief Program, TARP in informal nomenclature. Passing the $700 billion program was a matter of financial and economic life and death according to Washington.
They gave us the same panicky “must-have” arguments as a six-year-old in the toy aisle.
But once they got…
How do retail sales stack up in an atypical recovery?
Rob Parenteau, currency and credit markets expert, and editor of The Richebacher letter, analyzes the current state of the economy, as represented by retail sales. Can retail really drive the recovery?
What Obama was really doing in China
Baltimore — (TFN): It looks like we found out what President Obama was actually doing in China last week. When he wasn’t bowing to foreign leaders or taking tours of historic China, our leader was giving the Chinese some financial advice.
Isn’t that a scary thought?
Just a couple of days after Obama touched down in Washington, China makes a very American decree. It’s telling its banks it had better shore up their capital situations or face strong sanctions from the government.
They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. America did it first, now the communists are following.
In case you missed the news over the past year or so, China’s economy is flat-out soaring ahead. While no figure that disseminates from…
When will the depression be over? When the work is done.
Bill Bonner, venerable voice of reason (with a touch of doom), at The Daily Recokoning, looks long term at gold, the markets, and the end of the depression.
Audit the Fed – Amendment to a $200 billion bill frightens currency traders!
So what was it that spooked the markets… Well… The only thing I can find was the report yesterday about falling Housing Starts that Chris told you about… Did you know that about 14% of US homeowners were either delinquent on their mortgage or in some stage of foreclosure? That is the highest rate since the group started collecting the data in 1972!
But there was something else that was announced as the day went on, that I think probably spooked the markets more than anything else… And that is a key House panel approved two amendments to a sweeping financial-overhaul bill that would give federal watchdogs new authority to audit the Federal Reserve, and would establish a fund of as much as $200 billion to help dissolve large, troubled institutions. Rep. Ron Paul (R., Texas) offered the amendment seeking to subject the Fed to audits.
McDonald’s beats the Street
Now that’s the kind of quarter investors own McDonald’s (MCD) for.
Earnings for the third quarter, reported before the market open on Oct. 22, climbed to $1.15 a share from $1.05 in the third quarter of 2008. That was above Wall Street expectations…
Expand the pay czar’s role
So the word is out that Kenneth Feinberg, the Obama hatchet man, is going to have the pay of the top 25 executives at 7 of the companies who have not paid back the TARP money, by as much as 90%. If that’s a good idea for those companies why not look at…
Fannie and Freddie are zeroes, analysts say
If you own shares of Fannie Mae (FNM) or Freddie Mac (FRE), you’re sitting on a whole lot of nothing, according to analysts at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods.The analysts cut the price target on both stocks to zero and downgraded them to underperform.In o…
A giant cash machine
Why? That’s always the first question to ask when you see a common stock like Verizon (VZ) trading with a dividend yield of 6.52%.
That’s so much higher than the yield on the Standard & Poor’s 500 index (2.1% as of last week) that any reasonable i…