Bottoming Out With The Formerly Middle Class

Friday, FY08 week 47 Quote of the Week: The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable. – John Kenneth Galbraith Four thoughts for week 47. 1) If you're like me, you must occasionally wonder how it is that members of the financial media draw a salary with a straight face, versed as most are at stating the total obvious in such an obvious manner. It would seem to me that if they're going to keep restating the readily apparent, these writers could at least...
Read More >>

This Bud's For You And My Subscribers

Here's how the doom and gloomers cost you money. In late October, I sent my Asia Business & Investing readers a suggestion that they double down on Anheuser Busch (BUD) at $56.99. The reason was simple. Wall Street's gloomers were screaming at the top of their lungs that they were sure BUD's merger with InBev was off because InBev was relying on bridge loans to do the deal.  And of course, by late October credit had all but vanished. Ooooh the doom! "BUD will fall below $50,"...
Read More >>

Has Gold Lost its Luster?

Gold dropped from $915 to $859 on Friday. That's not supposed to happen while the market is crashing. What's going on? It's not that gold has lost its luster. But institutional investors were forced to sell gold on Friday to meet margin calls. If equity and hard assets continue to lose value anywhere near the rate of last week, margin liquidation will continue. And gold could go down even more. But make no mistake about it. With the market crashing and dozens of governments printing money like...
Read More >>

Is the American Dream Fading?

We're in a "damned if we do, damned if we don't" economy. And there's not a damn thing we can do about it. Our economy floats on the whims of the American consumer. When they feel confident about the future, they spend. The more they spend, the better the economy does. This is oddly true even if 80 percent of the spending is on goods from Asia. Right now the American consumer isn't feeling so confident and the economy is suffering as a result. But if we spend more, we go more into...
Read More >>

Can Big Oil Find Ways to Grow?

Strange things are going on in the oil patch. They could help make Obama look good. But what's good for Obama may ultimately give the U.S. its biggest energy headache yet. As oil continues its dizzying fall, cheap energy and gas will allow Americans to spend more on other things. But oil companies aren't happy and are reacting in different ways. Some, like ExxonMobil, are continuing their spending plans. For ExxonMobil, that would be a tidy $25-30 billion a year. Most of the other oil majors...
Read More >>

Who Elected These Guys?

This week's election is naturally the nation's main focus. What will an Obama Presidency mean for your investments, taxes, career, family and future? Is there any hope for America after 20 years of Bush/Clinton/Clinton/Bush/Bush? That's a knockout combination of punches if there ever was one. No mas, please. You likely know I didn't vote for the Demopublicans. Each major party demonizes the other and then goes about its business of further indebting us, stripping our liberties and dumbing us...
Read More >>

A Balanced Approach

Reacting to market moves guarantees you will be on the losing end of the equation. Jumping in and out of investments as the market swings up and down is the absolute worst way to invest. It amounts to market timing with a broken clock. Sometime around the late eighties, a real brain found a way to quantify what we in the investment business had been recommending for many years, a balanced portfolio. He called it asset allocation. What asset allocation did for investors is to prove, once and for...
Read More >>