Yesterday, IMF President Christine Lagarde said the Fed should hold off on hiking interest rates until 2016. Apparently Ms. Lagarde and her Keynesian brethren who dominate global policy circles, are so terrified of a 0.25% interest rate hike that they dream up reasons to delay the day of reckoning. Ms. Lagarde justified her policy call by saying inflation is too low and there are “significant uncertainties as to the future resilience of economic growth.” Seems an odd sentiment considering how ineffective Fed policy has been at driving strong growth in the U.S. over recent years. Hopefully … [Read more...]
My First Drum Set and The Killers
If you're a drummer or a musician then you know--you never forget your first drum set or instrument. I started playing drums in the first grade taking private lessons and practicing on a drum pad. Then I moved up to a snare drum. And I would set up buckets around the snare and bang away as if it were a set. When I was in fifth grade my dad and I drove to New Bedford, MA after reading an ad in the newspaper for a drum set. That was a mistake. The second I saw it, one of us was sold. It was a classic Slingerland five-piece set-up with Zildjian cymbals. Slingerland was the set made famous by … [Read more...]
Auto Sales Soar
Automobile sales are soaring. In May, auto sales hit a new cycle high and an almost 10-year high. Soaring auto sales are a bullish signal for the economy, but auto stocks seem to disagree. The S&P 1500 automobiles index has been trending down since 2013. What is the performance of auto stocks telling us about the economy? Stock prices are forward looking. Investors may be saying that the current run rate of sales in the auto sector is about as good as it gets. If that is true, a cyclical downturn in auto sales may be closer than some expect or alternatively competition in the sector is … [Read more...]
Financial Disaster Prep
You never know when you're going to be in a bad spot. But when TSHTF, you know it. And it doesn't feel very good. I want you to think about your investments from a survivalist point of view. What do you need to do to make sure you survive? And what's the downside of being prepared? It is clear as day that we have a currency system that will always be untethered from reality. There is no other way around it. That's why you need to have some precious metals in your portfolio and some coins outside of it. When I was a kid scooping ice cream for minimum wage a medium, two scoops, cost … [Read more...]
The Monday Melee: The Robots are Coming
Ubiquitous Autonomous and Imminent It seems like everywhere you turn in the news there are stories of new advances in robot technology. Stories are heralding robots as the solution to seemingly every problem. There are rescue robots, killer robots, finance robots, professor robots, flying robots, swimming robots, and every other type you can imagine. Needless to say, robots are getting a lot of attention. Amazon is looking to improve its operations with robots and held a competition to find a robot that could pick out items from shelves. The results were mixed, but it's only a beginning for … [Read more...]
Federal Reserve: Coming Clean
St. Louis Federal Reserve President James Bullard who has made a habit of moving markets by lobbing monetary policy grenades into the markets when they are least expected is coming clean on the Fed’s failed monetary experiment. You may recall that many investors credited Bullard with single handedly putting a floor under a nasty stock market correction last October by suggesting the Fed should halt the taper. Well he is sort of coming clean. Bullard is out with a new paper that comes to the very obvious conclusion that holding rates at zero since 2008 or promising to hold them there for … [Read more...]
Has Warren Buffett Lost His Mind?
Leave it to good ole' Warren Buffett to create a stir. In a recent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, he calls for an expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) to help low-income workers. How about a reduction in the size of government instead Mr. Buffett? Let workers keep more of what they make and this economy would be much better off. If government is such a great wealth transmission system, why not donate your money to the Treasury rather than the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation? Elite businessmen like Buffett do nothing to help this economy when they forget about the successful … [Read more...]
The Inflation Ruse
Inflation plays a key role in the monetary policy decisions of the Federal Reserve. The Fed’s mandate is maximum employment and stable prices. In its infinite wisdom the Fed has decided that the definition of price stability means 2% inflation. How the Fed gets away with defining an inflation rate that wipes out about half the value of a dollar over a 30-year period as price stability is truly bewildering, but I’ll leave that topic for another day. Since professors Bernanke & Yellen took over the Fed, the central bank has been obsessed with hitting its self-imposed 2% inflation target. … [Read more...]
The Crash that Cured Itself
James Grant, in his book The Forgotten Depression—1921: The Crash That Cured Itself, explains the resilience of the free market. During the 1921 economic contraction, the government and the Fed got out of the way, and America was better for it. The Mises Institute writes: James Grant, of Grant's Interest Rate Observer, recently joined us at our event in Stamford, Connecticut, to discuss his new book, The Forgotten Depression—1921: The Crash That Cured Itself. If you've never heard of the Depression of 1921, it's because the federal government and the (then new) Federal Reserve did the … [Read more...]
Greetings from 5th Avenue, Naples, Florida
Our office in Naples, Florida is located at 500, 5th Ave., which has received a Certificate of Excellence for the second year in a row from TripAdvisor. Naplesnews.com explains the award here, and you can see our white, Bermuda-style office building in the background of the picture. Naplesnews.com writes: 5th Avenue South received TripAdvisor’s Certificate of Excellence for the second year in a row. The Certificate of Excellence honors accommodations, attractions, and restaurants that consistently receive high reviews for a certain volume of reviews received. To be eligible, a business … [Read more...]
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