2012

This is a gold level post for members only.

The average interest rate for a savings account today is 0.45%. It wasn't that long ago that one could easily earn 5% in a well-chosen savings account, like those offered by ING Direct, or bump that up by a point or two by putting money…

Whatever happened to fuel switching between natural gas and diesel? The switch from diesel to natural gas is one of the biggest types of fuel switching in transport. You see this with all the buses now running natural gas instead of diesel.…

This is a gold-level post for members only. The EU is deathly afraid of either Spain or Italy getting into trouble and will do almost anything these countries ask. On the other hand, Hungary is expendable. This has clear investing…

Good video with Steve Keen, the Australian economics professor with Max Keiser. Steve not only talks about the Australian economy and that country's housing bubble but also about the bursting of housing bubbles in Canada, the UK and Hong…

Faber, Buffett and Grantham were bullish as stocks reached their financial crisis nadir

This is a good segment from CNBC on the dichotomy we see in the housing market of still falling house prices and rising rents. Is the rise in rents a foreshadowing of house prices stabilising? Take a look.

This is a silver level post asking to what degree the US recovery is fuelled by household sector releveraging.

MF Global may prove to be yet another example of how meaningless the word “bonus” has become. One of the trustees overseeing the broken firm wants to pay out hundreds of thousands of dollars to three executives who used to report to Jon…

This daily commentary is a bronze level members-only post. I saw a number of commentaries this past weekend and late in the week that were gloomier than one would have expected. In the US, consumer credit is expanding as are jobs and most…