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Since founding Agora Inc. in 1979, Bill Bonner has found success and garnered camaraderie in numerous communities and industries. A man of many talents, his entrepreneurial savvy, unique writings, philanthropic undertakings, and preservationist activities have all been recognized and awarded by some of America’s most respected authorities. Along with Addison Wiggin, his friend and colleague, Bill has written two New York Times best-selling books, Financial Reckoning Day and Empire of Debt. Both works have been critically acclaimed and internationally. With political journalist Lila Rajiva, he wrote his third New York Times best-selling book, Mobs, Messiahs and Markets, which offers concrete advice on how to avoid the public spectacle of modern finance. Since 1999, Bill has been a daily contributor and the driving force behind The Daily Reckoning .
The stock market took a tumble yesterday. The Dow fell 265 points after investors had a chance to ruminate about the Fed’s latest action. It wasn’t what the Fed did or said that discouraged investors. It was what it didn’t say and what it didn’t do.
Yesterday’s markets barely moved in any significant direction, so we will ignore them and go on to today. It’s a big day for the men who rule us. The Fed’s Open Market Committee meets to decide what to do.
We left off yesterday’s issue “When Good Falling Prices Go Bad” wondering what stock market investors were thinking. They bought stocks heavily on Monday. Then, yesterday, they sold them a bit – the Dow fell 38 points.
The stock market in the US was flat on Friday. Gold rose $13. China edged out Japan to become the world’s second largest economy. Bonds rose. And the dollar fell.
There are two major schools of thought on what is coming next…and two renegade, home-schools too. There are those who believe we have a recovery…though weak…that will continue and eventually bring the economy back to health. This is the line of the O
Imagine the face of Lt. George Morris. On March 8, 1862, his ship, the USS Cumberland, found itself a victim of what the economist Joseph Schumpeter called ‘creative destruction.’ The creativity came in the form of a revolutionary new technology, iro
In the sushi again…just like we said! The US stock market managed a weak rally yesterday. The Dow rose 56 points. Gold fell, closing the day below $1,200. This morning, stocks are generally going down again all over the world.
Let’s see…what’s in the news today? Stocks went down again yesterday. The Dow got trimmed by 96 points. Gold, on the other hand, went up $3 to $1,245.The first half of the year came to a close with the S&P 500 down 6%, global stocks down 10%, oil do
Stabilize public debts by 2016? By then, the US and other major economies will have more government debt than GDP. It is bound to be too late for many of them.
The latest from the G20 meeting in Toronto. As you recall, the meeting was billed as a showdown between the Germans and the Americans…that is, between the deficit cutters and the big spenders…
You say yes, I say no You say stop and I say go, go, go Oh, no – The Beatles We keep saying the same thing here at The Daily Reckoning. Not because we lack imagination… It’s because things are still the same.
What happened to the recovery? This report from AP: WASHINGTON (AP) – Sales of previously occupied homes dipped 2.2 percent in May, signaling that a boost from home-buying tax credits is fading sooner than expected.
The economic downturn in the US is discussed with reference to the excessive debt and deficit spending and how that will affect the long term economic outlook.
Stocks were flat yesterday. Gold fell $3. The news was mixed. The big debate is between those who think the authorities are being too tight and those who think they are being too loose. Broadly, Europeans are on one side. Americans are on the other.
Stocks rallied yesterday. The Dow rose 213 points. Gold went up too – plus $9. So many people are buying gold coins that the storage vaults are getting crowded, says a Bloomberg report.
The Dow dropped another 115 points yesterday. Gold moved up to near an all-time high. This past weekend, we worked on a barn roof…just like we did 30 years ago. But come Monday morning we didn’t feel 30 years old. Our legs still ached from the weeken
Markets were closed in America yesterday. But there’s still reckoning to do. So, we’re on the job as usual. As predicted in this space, Americans have gone back to saving.
Markets all over the world went down again yesterday. The Dow dropped below 10,000 in the morning trading…then came back to give up a modest 22 points by the closing bell.
Today, the euro. Tomorrow, the dollar. The euro is taking a beating. Investors are worried that it won’t survive Europe’s debt problems.
The fixes are more costly than the problems. “Systems of problem solving develop greater complexity and higher costs over long periods… the destructive potential is evident in historical cases where increased expenditures on socioeconomic complexity
Boom, Baby, Boom… What’s going on in China? That’s what we’ve come here to find out. We paid a visit to China 25 years ago and haven’t been back since. More on China in just a minute…
Where do bad debts go after they die? On Monday, investors seem to have convinced themselves that they just disappeared…like Amelia Earhart or TARP funds. But by Tuesday, they began to worry about ghosts.
Can you still buy a sports car for $10,000? We bought our first real automobile for $78. It was a ’37 Plymouth. Beautiful car. All original. And it ran well…for a while. We were only 16. We didn’t have a driver’s license yet, but we were getting read
Oh la la…that was fast! We’ve had headaches that lasted longer… One day the world is convinced that the central bankers and financial meddlers of Europe have the secret to success. The next day, they change their minds. Turns out, the euro feds don’t
Europe has lost its head! First, the weather is completely out-of-sync with the calendar. Perhaps it’s because of the volcano in Iceland… The dust is blotting out the sun. There’s no sun here today. Instead, the sky is pale grey. And it’s raining. Th
The Dow fell 59 points yesterday. It looks to us as though the stock market is finally rolling over…it’s finally putting in a big top after a long, long bounce. But it could be just another temporary setback. We won’t know for a while. In the mea
The idea is to push slimy packages of derivative debt onto people who don’t know what they’re doing. Serving lumps to chumps, in other words. Like a high-school cafeteria. Sometimes the victims are German banks. Sometimes they’re hedge funds. And
Consumer sentiment and overall market optimism in the face of bad fundamental economic data in the US is discussed in this essay
"The absence of fear in the current economy is discussed as a delusion brought on by the excessive touting of the Great Correction and economic recovery."
When will the de-leveraging bust resume? When we stop worrying about it. This afternoon, we realized that deep down, our feelings had changed: we had stopped worrying about a resumption of the bear market.
It’s springtime. The temperature is 85 degrees here in Washington. New York is approaching record-breaking temperatures. Global warming is back in business.The flowers are out. Cherry blossoms are thick on the ground. The grass is yearning for the mo
The Dow was up 9 points on Friday…following a week of big news. Congress passed a bill permitting the US government to take over the health sector…about 17% of US GDP. Let’s see.
Still on the road to moksha… Prices are rising in India – pushed up by the high cost of food. Thanks partly to a disastrous government policy of encouraging the over-use of chemical fertilizer, food prices are shooting up. In a poor country, food
There’s good news and bad news…and a lot of news in between. Consumers spent a little more than was expected of them. And manufacturing did a little better than expected too.
A couple of years ago, we used to get such a kick out of making fun of the financial industry. Its pretensions were absurd and shocking. Its delusions were breathtaking. Its leaders were lunkheads and grifters.
Gerald Ford had the right idea. The year was 1975. New York City was in financial trouble. It had to borrow to pay its operating expenses. And lenders were getting tough. So Mayor Abe Beame turned to Washington, begging for a bailout.
The Dow rose 150 points yesterday. We’re not sure what to make of it. Does it mean we were wrong about the beginning of the end? Are we still in the middle? Or is our whole theory wrong?
Well, it’s a new world, after all… Maybe we were wrong. Maybe the mainstream economists are right. You know, up to now all they’ve been good at was explaining why the forecasts they made in the past didn’t work out.
China’s lending curb sparks a rush for safety.” That’s how The Financial Times describes what happened yesterday. Investors were more moved by fear than by greed. Dow sold off 112 points. Gold dropped $27. The dollar and bonds were up.
Oh happy days are here again. Obama is going to get our money back from the banks. Jeffrey Sachs is telling Haiti how it can get its economy back in order (with other people’s money, naturally). And Thomas Friedman is offering investment advice.
Well, that was it for 2009. Whew! Another great year for gold. But it wasn’t a bad year for stocks either. The NASDAQ rose 45%. The Dow went up about 20%.
“A nightmare decade for stocks,” says a headline in The Wall Street Journal. “Investors would have been better off investing in pretty much anything else, from bonds to gold or even just stuffing money under a mattress. Since the end of 1999, stoc
Growth requires finance. Capital needs to be raised and allocated. Then, earnings must be distributed and invested. And, of course, consumers want credit too.
“Things were pretty rough there for a while…what with the recession and all. But now there’s a recovery. Business is picking up.”
Whatever else may be going on, there’s a real bull market in gold. It’s a bull market that began ten years ago. If you’d bought stocks then, you’d have about what you have now…less inflation. If you’d bought gold…you have about 4 times what you had t
The newspapers are a-buzz with stories of Obama’s trip to China. The Financial Times tells us what “he should have said.” According to the FT, the American president should have told the Chinese that he wasn’t going to put the US into depression just
In the ’80s, everyone wanted to be Japanese. Management consultants used Japanese words to describe commonplace insights. For example, instead of saying that businesses always need to try to do things better, they referred to “kaizen” as if it were t
Most people find it both galling and absurd to see the bankers getting $10 million bonuses while there is 10% unemployment. Here at The Daily Reckoning, it’s just a matter of curiosity.
Governments are running breathtaking deficits…and accumulating alarming debts. Japan has a national debt of nearly 200% of its GDP. Where did that debt come from? It came from 20 years of trying to buy its way out of a slump with borrowed money.
What’s the best way to get through a debt crisis? Straight through was our advice last week. For at least a thousand years, the business cycle went round and round without help from central bankers or economists. It is only since these geniuses have
Last week, stocks went up. Stocks went down. Not much was proved one way or another. The week ended in a draw, as near as we can tell.
Look at the price of oil – over $79. And the price of gold – over $1050. Compared to each other – oil and gold – prices are stable. But against the dollar both are rising. In other words, people with dollars are trading them for oil and gold.
Yesterday, the Dow soared over they 10,000 mark. If it keeps going at this rate – up 144 points yesterday – it will soon equal the post-’29 bounce. All we need is two more days and we’re there.
Yesterday was another exciting day on Wall Street. The Dow rose 131 points…and gold shot up $25 to a new record, $1043.Investors must be pondering the future. What will the future look like? No one knows.
What is it that actually causes a depression? A stock market collapse? Or too much debt? How come government can appear to cure the problem sometimes – 2001-2007 – but not other times?
The trouble with being a contrarian is that you can never be quite contrarian enough. We began having doubts about the ‘feds inflate…gold soars’ hypothesis last year. It was too easy…too obvious. And if it were that easy to inflate a nation’s curr
Let’s get this straight. Household credit is shrinking… Profits are shrinking… Employment is shrinking… Housing values are shrinking… The wage base is shrinking… But the recession is over!
These are the times that try our souls… …well, maybe not our souls…but at least our convictions. But look at gold this morning!
This week marks the one-year anniversary of the Lehman bankruptcy. The media struggles to say something meaningful about it. Here at The Daily Reckoning we will not even attempt meaningfulness. We’ll be satisfied with a few snide remarks.
Clowns to the left of us…jokers to the right… The Simpleton’s Analysis: Consumers cut back. The economy sank. Now, government must take action. It must help people out and take up the slack.
It is amazing how many things have NOT happened. Probably most incredible is that the dollar has NOT collapsed. It has lost ground, and was trading at $1.43 per euro on Friday, but no one laughs at you when go to exchange dollars…or offer to pay in dollars rather than the local currency.
Summer is over…and the rally may be over, too. It’s back to business. No more long lunches. No more afternoons painting windows. No more soirees in the evening. We return to our lonely métier – chronicling the decline and fall of the US economy…and the Anglo-American empire too….
Hey, the economy is not only recovering…it’s becoming better than ever before!
Summer is over. It’s back to work…12 hours a day…just like we’ve worked for the past 39 years. When we were in college we had no money. In the summer we had to work two jobs to try to save enough cash to continue. One summer, we worked in a boatyard in Annapolis early in the morning…then, we did an evening shift painting television towers. Painting the towers was such dangerous work our poor mother begged us to quit. But the money was good – $5.25 an hour – so we had to keep at it. More about that in a minute…
Our story continues… According to the popular version, Ben Bernanke, our flawed hero, has averted a Second Great Depression. When the crisis came in ’07-’08, he calmly took out the text he had written himself: “Dummies’ Guide to Avoiding a Japan-style Deflation”…or something like that.
Now the summer days are dwindling down to a precious few. This morning, it is overcast and chilly here in central France. The leaves on the aspen and linden trees have turned yellow already and whenever the wind blows, they flutter to the ground as if they were trying to get away from something.
The dollar will probably go up. Still, we’d stay away… Here is Warren Buffett’s view: “Last fall, our financial system stood on the brink of a collapse that threatened a depression. The crisis required our government to display wisdom, courage and decisiveness. Fortunately, the Federal Reserve and key economic officials in both the Bush and Obama administrations responded more than ably to the need.
A V-shaped recovery? A W-shaped recovery? Forget it…there ain’t no letter in the alphabet that describes a “recovery” we’re likely to have.
