Americans are being forced to live with inflation that is higher than most of them can ever remember. Among the bigger ticket items seeing rapid price increases is housing. Prices for houses are rising at a record pace. Nicole Friedman reports in The Wall Street Journal: Home-price growth surged to a record in 2021, as low mortgage-interest rates prompted buyers to compete fiercely for a limited number of homes for sale. The S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller National Home Price Index, which measures average home prices in major metropolitan areas across the nation, rose 18.8% in the 12 months … [Read more...]
Archives for February 2022
As US-Russia Tensions Push Oil Higher, Drillers Rediscover Shale Basins
With economies recovering from the pandemic, and tensions between Russia and the United States pushing oil prices higher than they already were, shale drillers are taking another look at basins they had abandoned when the pandemic hit. Collin Eaton reports for The Wall Street Journal: Spurred by the highest oil prices in years, shale companies are moving drilling rigs back into oil fields that were all but abandoned a few years ago. Private oil producers are leading an industry return to places like the Anadarko Basin of Oklahoma and the DJ Basin in Colorado, where drilling had almost … [Read more...]
Your Survival Guy Hears the Craziest Investing Stories
It’s pitch black outside Your Survival Guy’s home office this morning. It’s blowin’ a gale, feels like a tree could come down at any moment, and it’s raining sideways, with rapid-fire drops rat-a-tat-tatting against my bay windows. Louis is tucked into himself on his dog bed beside my desk. It’s a balmy 56 degrees outside—it’s February for cryin’ out loud—and get this, by tonight, it will be 21 with a chance of snow tomorrow. Crazy times. Speaking of crazy, Your Survival Guy hears the craziest investing stories on any given day. Here’s one I received this week from a husband and wife. It … [Read more...]
The White House Can’t Get Its Story Straight On Inflation
The gut instinct of Democrats in the White House to blame big corporations for inflation is getting pushback from a surprising place, the White House Council of Economic Advisors. Apparently, Democrats' explanations of inflation are so preposterous, even their own economists object. The Washington Post reports: When the prepared congressional testimony of a senior administration official was circulated inside the White House in recent weeks, it included a passage tying inflation to corporate consolidation and monopoly power. That language was eventually taken out of the remarks before they … [Read more...]
FEAR: Gold Prices Surge on Potential Russia-Ukraine War
As tension in Ukraine hits extreme levels, investors are heading for the safety they see in gold. Suzanne O'Halloran reports for Fox Business that gold prices have spiked to a nine-month high in response to the risk of war. She writes: Nervous investors, spooked by a Russian-Ukraine conflict, barreled into gold on Thursday, driving the price to a level not seen since June of 2021: $1,900.70 and upward momentum may continue, aiding the SPDR Gold ETF. "Gold has key resistance around the $1920 to $1930 zone, but if the [safe] haven bid remains strong, bullish momentum could support a move … [Read more...]
Don’t Be a FOOL: When Investors Reach for Yield
Quick public service announcement. It’s going to be a busy summer in Newport. Your Survival Guy can sense it. Last night, for example, we went down to the Clarke Cooke House on Bannister’s Wharf for some oysters. It felt like the middle of summer, and it’s only mid-February. If you’re planning to visit Newport, make your reservations now. OK, let’s dig into this. When it comes to investing and personal security, Your Survival Guy looks at risk, first and foremost. As a rule of thumb, I do not base my investment decisions on past performance, and I always look to Dick Young’s North Star for … [Read more...]
Warning Signs in the Bond Market
The bond market is sending warning signals to investors. Liz McCormick and Michael Mackenzie report in Bloomberg: With precipitous drops in some leading technology stocks and wild swings in the S&P 500, equities have provided plenty of drama this year. But for clues to the direction of the U.S. economy, listen to the $23 trillion U.S. Treasury market. Right now, that market is saying inflation and the potential for a slowdown in growth are both threats. People who buy Treasury securities don’t worry about getting their money back—the U.S. government always pays its bills. But they do … [Read more...]
SIMPLISTIC AND MISLEADING: Obama Official Calls Out Joe Biden’s Economic Assessment
Steven Rattner, a former economic counselor to the Obama administration, best known as the "car czar," for his role in handling the bankruptcies of GM and Chrysler, has slammed Joe Biden's recent economic assessment as "simplistic and misleading." The Daily Caller reports: Former Obama administration economic official Steven Rattner pushed back on President Joe Biden’s explanation of the causes of the inflation crisis in an op-ed Thursday for The New York Times, blaming the federal government’s enthusiastic spending. Referring to an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, in which the president … [Read more...]
INVESTORS: Here’s the Best Way to Beat Inflation
What’s the best way to beat inflation? Own your own business. Get a job. Keep a job. You know basic stuff. Like eating your vegetables. But if you’re retired and have a sizable nest egg, the best approach is to have a basket of Your Survival Guy-type stocks. You know, dividend payers that not only have a history of payments but of increases too. When you’re as rich as Croesus, you don’t need the markets. You can do what Dick Young and Ben Graham advise, which is to run your finger along the allocation mix of between 30-70 and 70-30 of stocks and bonds. This is a stock picker’s market. It’s one … [Read more...]
The Economic Case for Engaging China is Backfiring
Giving western companies the chance to sell goods into Chinese markets was always the rationale for engagement with the Communist country. The potential for a "win-win" trade with China was a carrot so big, American and European leaders looked over the country's human rights abuses and anti-freedom ideology. For a while, it seemed like it would work, that China would continue to buy more and more goods from Western brands forever, but now that dream is fading. Bloomberg's Jinshan Hong, Yasufumi Saito, and Adrian Leung detail how China's domestic brands are beating western brands, and ruining … [Read more...]
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