Is Fed Chair Nominee Jay Powell, Count Dracula?

The gray hue of dawn quickly slipped to a bright clear sky as we set out last Saturday morning.  The season’s autumn tinge abounded around us as the distant mountain peaks, and their mighty rifts, grew closer.  The nighttime chill stubbornly lingered in the crisp air.

Like Jonathan Harker’s journey to Transylvania roughly 120 years ago, we also traveled eastward.  Our route, however, did not take as through Vienna and Budapest.  Nor did it take us upward into the Carpathian Mountains.

Instead, we traversed along the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, passing from the Angeles National Forest to the San Bernardino National Forest.  Then we climbed upward to the mile-high Oak Glen village, up above the outermost rim of the Los Angeles Basin.  We’d finally outrun Southern California’s seemingly endless sea of concrete.

At this mountain hamlet, we didn’t witness one single stoplight or franchise drive-thru.  Billboards, transmission lines, rail corridors, and graffiti art did not blight the countryside.  The built milieu hardly scared the natural landscape. Continue reading

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How to Survive the Winter

One of the fringe benefits of living in a country that’s in dire need of a political, financial, and cultural reset, is the twisted amusement that comes with bearing witness to its unraveling. Day by day we’re greeted with escalating madness.  Indeed, the great fiasco must be taken lightly, so as not to be demoralized by its enormity.

Of particular note is the present cast of characters.  Could Bill Shakespeare himself have come up with a more flawless flock of scoundrels to take the plotless narrative from comedy to tragedy?

There’s President Trump, Hillary Clinton, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Maxine Waters, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Robert Mueller, the Podesta Brothers, all of Congress; the list of political actors goes on and on.  Moreover, it wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t also mention former A-lister’s Barney Frank and O-Bama.

The political class’ efforts to climb and crawl over each other to reach the top of the dust heap and stay there are without restraint.  Promises, lies, coercions, and deceits are all part of Washington’s standard operating procedures.  They’ll steal from your kids and lie to grandma to get what they want. Continue reading

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The Downright Sinister Rearrangement of Riches

Let’s begin with facts.  Cold hard unadorned facts.

Water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit at standard atmospheric pressure.  Squaring the circle using a compass and straightedge is impossible.  The sun is a star.

Facts, of course, must not be confused with opinions, which are based upon observations.  Barack Obama throws like a girl.  The Federal Register is for idiots.  Two slices of chocolate cake are one too many.  Are these opinions right or wrong?

The answer depends on who you ask.  What’s certain about opinions, however, is that like bellybuttons, everybody has one.  Moreover, unlike free drugs from the government, everyone is in fact entitled to their own opinion.

Moving on from facts and opinions, the next classification we encounter is the wholly asinine.  This broadly contains the absurd and ridiculous.  Take most university teachers, barring physical science professors, for instance.  They’re wholly asinine.  The wholly asinine also extends to editors at the New York Times, Washington Post, circus hunchbacks, and the like. Continue reading

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Tales from a Late Stage Bull Market

An endearing quality of a late stage bull market is that it expands the universe of what’s possible.  Somehow, rising stock prices make the impossible, possible.  They also push the limits of the normal into the paranormal.

Last week, for instance, there was a Bigfoot sighting near Avocado Lake in Fresno County, California.  But it wasn’t just one Bigfoot.  According to a local farmer, there was a family of five or six Bigfoot running across his ranch in the middle of the night.  Paranormal expert Jeffery Gonzalez offered the following Bigfoot sighting anecdote:

“One of them, which was extremely tall, had a pig over its shoulder.  And the five scattered and the one with the pig was running so fast it didn’t see an irrigation pipe and it tripped, with the pig flying over.”

What to make of it?

Bigfoot sightings, no doubt, are pro-growth.  They’re bullish for stock prices.  So, too, are warnings from North Korea that nuclear war “may break out at any moment.” Continue reading

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