Welcome to Life After the End of the World

Posted on December 21, 2012 by MN Gordon

“It’s important to rescue the frog.” – Al Gore Jr., Nobel Prize Laureate.

The Great Conmen of Our Day

Known unknowns are commonly unsettling.  People pay good money for the comfort of a favorable prediction, particularly when it’s from someone with strong convictions.  It doesn’t really matter if the forecaster is right or not.  What’s important is how they sound when they portend the future.

Could you imagine a world where a bridge engineer miscalculated as often as a weatherman?  Or where a carpenter was as wrong as a stockbroker?  Bridges would collapse and roofs would cave in as quickly as a dark cloud appears on the horizon or a trading session reverses course.

Central bankers are the great conmen of our day.  Take Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, for instance.  He’s printing up $85 billion each month to prop up U.S. Treasury debt and the mortgage market.

According to Bernanke all this monetary intervention is for our own good.  He believes the economy’s lacking demand.  His theory is all this cheap credit will stimulate demand, which will boost the economy and lower the unemployment rate. Continue reading →

Posted in Economy, MN Gordon | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Breaking Down a Biotech Winner

Posted on December 18, 2012 by MN Gordon

Breaking Down a Biotech Winner
By Alex Daley, Casey Extraordinary Technology

Traditional cancer treatment options are little more than a crude mix of “slash, burn, and poison” – that is surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy.  There are radical new treatments in labs and trials all over the world that promise to throw out this trifecta; no other disease has received more of the research interest and funding that have defined modern biotechnology over the past three decades.

I’m not going to tell you about any of those here.  Sure, many of them will be wildly successful and make many investors fabulously wealthy over the next few decades.  But most will fail.  And those that don’t will take a long time to turn a profit for investors.

Yet, there is one small company whose unique twist on cancer treatment is proving to be a major upgrade.  We profiled this company in a recent edition of Casey Extraordinary Technology, and it turned in a gain of over 167 percent for subscribers in just six months’ time.  It may yet make billions more still for investors. Continue reading →

Posted in Alex Daley, Stock Market | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Blowing Gas

Posted on December 14, 2012 by MN Gordon

Things sure do change.  Several years ago the personnel working the freeway off ramps in Long Beach, California, were immigrants from Mexico.  They were selling oranges and roses to working stiffs on the way home from their cubicle jobs.

These days you’ll find recent college graduates, who haven’t broken into the professional world, strumming guitars for pocket change.  Obviously, it’s plain bad luck to graduate from college, with a bunch of student loan debt, at the very moment a 60 year economic expansion runs out of gas.  But if the economy sputters long enough, people will take to doing strange and dangerous things for money.

About a decade ago, while visiting several in laws – and outlaws – in Mexico City, we witnessed some remarkable street corner performances.  While at a stop light, for example, one shirtless lunatic wandered out in front of the car with broken glass wrapped in a towel.  He then quickly laid the towel and the broken glass on the asphalt street and rolled around on it. Continue reading →

Posted in Inflation, MN Gordon | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Malady of the Federal Reserve

Posted on December 11, 2012 by MN Gordon

Ben Bernanke and his pals at the Federal Reserve are meeting today to come up with their next plan for manipulating credit markets.  Tomorrow they’ll let us know their grand designs for monkeying with the money supply and interest rates.  Of course, you can count on more money at cheaper prices…it’s what they always do.

If only more money equaled more wealth.  Then we’d all be rich.  After all, the Federal Reserve’s added $2 trillion dollars to its balance sheet and pushed the federal funds rate to practically zero since mid-2008.

Unfortunately, more money does not automatically equal more wealth.  Sometimes more money equals less wealth.  In fact, the typical American family’s net worth fell 39 percent between 2007 and 2010.  What gives?

The fact of the matter is more money, by way of cheaper credit, does not equal more wealth.  It equals more debt.  More debt, especially when used for consumption, equals the exact opposite of more wealth; it equals less wealth. Continue reading →

Posted in Inflation, MN Gordon | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment