Bearish News

In the clip below, Austrian economist Jeffrey Tucker, founder of Laissez Faire books, talks with Russia Today’s Lauren Lyster.  A number of free-market related topics are discussed, including: central banks, minimum wages, and interest rates. Worth a watch:

From the creator of Quantitative Easing Explained (which just reached 5 million views on Youtube) Omid Malekan.

And here’s QE Explained, for those who haven’t seen it yet:

• 1984: (warning of a surveillance state)
• 2001: “This [housing] bubble will burst, as all bubbles do”.
• 2002: “Over the next decade, Americans will become poorer and less free”

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).