financial history

Ben Bernanke claims to be an expert student of the Great Depression and its causes. Therefore, many feel comforted that he knows what to do should in order to avert a repeat of 1929. But does he know how to prevent a repeat of the Japanese…

Yesterday, I posted a blog entry detailing how Stephen Roach sees inflation as a concern, not because of food and oil, but because of Asian manufacturers. I find his argument compelling. Don't get me wrong, I think deflation is the…

Barry Ritholtz at the Big Picture is on to something. He has found A Perfect Recession Indicator. Since 1953, when year-over-year Non-Farm payrolls have gone negative, there has been a recession. This happened nine out of nine times for…

Every week the U.S. Department of Labor puts out the previous week's jobless claims statistics through its Employment and Training Administration (Doleta). Analysts look at it to get a sense of how employment is being affected by the…

Economists have a way of coming up with more ratios and statistics than you can shake a stick at. True to my profession, I have developed a long-term yardstick of market overvaluation and undervaluation. I have no short-hand for it yet so…

Knowing when to invest is just as important as investing at all. When one analyzes the returns in the market over longer periods (5+ years), it becomes obvious that certain periods of investing are much less lucrative than others. We are…

Are we headed for a crash in commodities like the one in 1987 in equities? I doubt it. But, I am concerned that the commodities bubble is getting well out of hand. Certainly, the rationale for commodities as an inflation hedge and in a…

The United States has gone from saving an average of 8-10% of income for decades to zero or negative savings today. If you look at this chart of 12-month rolling average monthly data, it looks like people actually saved more as inflation…

As the writedowns at global financial institutions near $300 billion in capital lost as a result of the sub-prime crisis, the question as to when we reach a bottom is ever more urgent. Market history tells us that the severity of the bust…

This is a story of unequal re-distribution of wealth from the less fortunate to the more fortunate. This is a story of the United States in which the rich get richer at the expense of everybody else. At the conclusion, ask yourself: is this…