The “transitory” inflation swamping the country has stubbornly persisted into July. This week it was announced that producer prices posted a second straight 1% month-over-month increase, which brought the full year number to a record 7.8%. It was also reported that 12-month US export prices rose 17.2%, and nearly 22% if the rate of the […]
BIDEN’S HOUSING GAMBIT Read More »
What exactly is “transitory?” You and your wife may disagree on its meaning when your old friend asks if he can stay with you while he “Sorts things out.” The term is virtually worthless without some guiding context, as in “Honey, he’ll be out of here by Monday. Tuesday the latest.” Last week, Federal Reserve
HOW TRANSITORY IS TRANSITORY? Read More »
It’s dawning on many investors that our post-Covid financial problems may not be as easily solved as Washington claims. The latest clue that trouble is brewing has come from the sudden and dramatic arrival of inflation. On May 12, it was revealed that the Consumer Price Index (CPI) had risen 4.2% year-over-year, the fastest pace since
INFLATION CRASHES THE PARTY Read More »
Recently, a piece of collage art entitled “Everydays: The First 5000 Days,” by an artist known as Beeple, sold at a Christie’s auction for $69 million. The Wall Street Journal noted that the price was higher than any that has ever been paid for works of Frida Kahlo, Paul Gaugin, or Salvador Dali. But, before the auction, few outside
YOU WANNA BUY A BRIDGE? Read More »
The central idea in the classic Mel Brooks comedy “The Producers” is that unscrupulous Broadway impresarios could succeed fabulously by creating a play so uniquely awful that it would close on its first day. Their idea was to oversubscribe shares to investors, to the point where hundreds of percentages of ownership could be claimed. But
Springtime for GameStop Read More »
While most people generally understand that the stock market and the economy do not move in lock step, there is still an underlying belief that a strong market reflects a strong economy. But according to that logic, our current economy must be historically strong. If this strikes you as strange, given that we are in
The Best Of Times During The Worst Of Times Read More »
By Peter Schiff For years I have been warning that during the age of permanent stimulus (which began in earnest with the Federal Reserve’s reaction to the dotcom crash of 2000), each successive economic contraction would have to be met with ever larger, increasingly ineffective, doses of monetary and fiscal stimulus to keep the economy
A Black Swan with Teeth Read More »
According to Owen Ullmann in an op-ed published by USA Today, there are some unsung “heroes” in the battle against the coronavirus pandemic – the brave and courageous bankers at the Federal Reserve. I think Ulmann misspelled “villains.” Ulmann writes that the Fed “has taken extraordinary steps to prevent the global economy from crashing into
With Heroes Like This, Who Needs Villains? Read More »
While the country and the stock markets reel from the impact of the Coronavirus, many economists and politicians are calling for the government to fight the pandemic as if we had to fight the Second World War all over again. In his address from the White House on March 18, President Trump made this comparison
World War II Was Fought With Savings, Not Debt Read More »
With the markets shell shocked by of the worst weeks on record, analysts are split on whether investors are simply overreacting to the coronavirus epidemic or if we are confronting an actual existential threat to the global economy. While most epidemiologists caution that the virus will be nearly impossible to contain, the good news is
The Problem Is the Bubble, Not the Pin Read More »
