Bearish News

Nice long interview with Jim Rogers. Enjoy:

TL;DW:

• Explains why he moved to Singapore (likes China, but Bejing & Shanghai too polluted)
• He’s short stocks “across the world”
• Long commodities
• Long gold, silver
• Crisis still imminent, better to take the hit now

Joe Rogan made an entertaining appearance on Leno tonight, talking politics & smack. While doing some e-stalking, I found this: fan video (not made by him, tho he did tweet about it). Interesting independent political perspective.

A broad index of commodities, as tracked by IndexMundi.com (great site), is up 252% in the last 10 years.

So when an influential idiot like Christina Romer says, “the spectre of inflation is quickly fading”, as she did on Bloomberg TV recently, it makes one wonder. What is the time period these people are looking at? A week? A month? Only ones when commodities are down?

Stop to consider the fact that these price increases have occurred despite stagnant wages (the Keynesian’s preferred deflation argument being that inflation cannot occur without matching wage hikes) AND crawling money-velocity since the crunch. No matter what the Fed does, it is screwed going forward.

1. Tighten? Raise rates. Crush increasingly credit-dependent zombie economy (and banks, for some reason the Fed seems to favor the institutions who own it)
2. Expand lending? Massive inflation, continuation of zombie economy.
3. Keep lending slow, monetize debt. Hyperstagflation, ugly.

If I had my pick, I would of course go #1. Every time. But that’s not likely to be the case (for a while yet).

And regarding investment choices today, they’re a bit like a school cafeteria; sh1tty choices, but clear winners. I am looking to buy more precious metals and foreign bonds (pizza & french fries).

Bill Fleckenstein of Fleckenstein Capital talks to Bloomberg about the Fed, precious metals, and the difficulty of shorting this market (and being long).