Looking For Silver Linings
John Templeton, one of the greatest investors of all time, said that investors should buy at the point of maximum pessimism. Nothing illustrates the adage of something being easy to say and hard to do more than that statement. It is of course at the point of maximum pessimism that our natural psychological barrier to .. read more
Weekly Economic & Market Review
The stock market continued to defy gravity last week in its ongoing attempt to make me look like a fool for trying to predict its movements. We’ve recently moved our portfolios to a neutral risk position from the more aggressive stance we adopted during the great sovereign debt scare of last fall and are contemplating .. read more
Contrarian Alert
The chart below tells you all you need to know about the effect of the housing market on the US economy. Housing starts have averaged 1.487 million units annually for the past 50 years. They have normally recovered quite quickly after recessions. We have so far looked at 3 possible reasons to why housing starts .. read more
Contrarian Alert
As Joe has discovered, I tend to like a pictorial story. As a start to a series looking at the housing sector, let’s look at what is happening in the macro economy, beginning with the monetary and credit mechanisms. What happens to a dollar in our system? Dollars are constantly changing hands, but at any .. read more
Weekly Economic and Market Review
“We don’t have a precise read on why this slower pace of growth is persisting.” Ben Bernanke at his press conference last week following the FOMC meeting. That was – by far – the most important statement to come out of the post FOMC press conference last week. Bernanke finally had to admit that he .. read more
A Pothole On The Road To Growth
“There are always going to be some bumps on the road to recovery.” President Obama speaking at a Chrysler plant Friday after the May jobs report Surely the most disheartening part of that quote is the word “recovery”. Five years after the housing bubble started to deflate and nearly three years after the financial crisis, .. read more
The Adventures of G-Man
A little over a year ago, when it seemed that things just couldn’t get any worse, I was optimistic about the likelihood of an economic recovery. Pessimism was pervasive and the idea that the economy would recover seemed almost quaintly naive. To see a recovery on the horizon one had to either believe that the .. read more
The Illusion of Progress
If all you do is read headlines, it would seem that the US is making steady progress toward solving some of the most pressing issues of the day. President Obama went to Copenhagen last week and came away with an agreement which calls for developed nations to provide $30 billion to help developing nations deal .. read more
