We hope everyone had a happy New Year. There is a long informercial airing on American TV. It shows an endless parade of senior citizens, struggling to pay their bills, unable to buy that motorized stairway lift, play golf, or eat out at restaurants. The solution? Get a reverse mortgage! The number to call is […]
Merry Christmas to our American friends. Happy Christmas to the rest of the Anglosphere. Felicem natalem Christi to our Latin-speaking audience, and góðr jól to those who are reviving Old Norse as a great language! Let’s address two themes about the gold price trend that are increasingly in popularity the past few months—as the price […]
We have published many articles, arguing that bitcoin is unsound. Yet for all those arguments, there is a bright side to bitcoin. It is exciting to see that there is an audience of millions of people—mainstream people, not wild-eyed End-The-Fed gold bug preppers who keep their gold hoards with their stockpiles of ammo—who are looking […]
A meme we have seen in the bitcoin community seems to be gaining traction. Bitcoin is deflationary. That is prices of things, measured in bitcoin, are falling. For example, in spring 2011, gasoline was Ƀ1.00. This week, that same gallon had fallen to Ƀ0.0001875. Gas has gone down by 99.98 percent! We don’t think that […]
A reader emailed us, to ask a few pointed questions. Paraphrasing, they are: Who cares if dollars are calculated in gold or gold is calculated in dollars? People care only if their purchasing power has grown. What is the basis good for? Is it just mathematical play for gold theorists? How does knowing the basis […]
Last week, we made a very controversial statement. We are happy to write the truth, and let the chips fall where they may (e.g. our thoughtful disagreement with Ted Butler about price manipulation). We can accept the flak that we get for this, so long as our position is understood. Some criticized our approach as […]
Let’s take a look at an often-repeated idea that is popular in the gold and alternative investing communities. The government possesses a printing press. Therefore, it will never default. It will just inflate its way out of the debt. It will devalue the dollar. The government does not set the value of the dollar. And […]
Over the past few weeks, we have looked at the effects of falling interest rates: falling discount applied to future cash flows (and hence rising stock and bond prices), and especially falling marginal productivity of debt (MPoD). Falling MPoD means that we get less and less GDP “juice” for each new dollar of borrowing “squeeze”. […]
Physicists say that the universe is expanding. However, they hotly debate (OK, pun intended as a foreshadowing device) if the rate of expansion is sufficient to overcome gravity—called escape velocity. It may seem like an arcane topic, but the consequences are dire either way. If the rate of expansion is too low, then it will […]
Warren Buffet famously proposed the analogy of a machine that produces one dollar per year in perpetuity. He asks how much would you pay for this machine? Clearly it is worth something more than $1.00. And it’s equally clear that it’s not worth $1,000. The value is somewhere in between. But where? This leads to […]
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