GaryD

Total Rating:
0 / 0

81 Comments

    • Wed Feb 27th 18:34 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Time's Running Out as Wholesale Prices Keep Rising
      Winemaker, the fed creates inflation by allowing money to be created out of thin air. They do not fight inflation, they merely create more or less of it. The rise in prices that we are seeing is due to all the money pumping that has been going on since 2001. Rising prices are a consequence of the excess money creation. There is nothing the fed can do now. Prices will reset to higher levels that reflect the current amount of money in circulation. If the fed tries to prevent this they will cause a depression. If they try to slow it they will cause a recession (which they are strongly discouraged from doing by Congress). In all likelihood they will respond by creating even more money. This may kick the day of reckoning a few years down the road, but it won't solve the fundamental problem which is that our currency has been farcked by the powers that be.

      What many people don't understand is that a huge portion of America's wealth is due to the status of the greenback as the world's reserve currency. Foreigners have stockpiled massive amounts of US currency in order to ensure that they can buy commodities, food, and oil (all of which are denominated in US dollars). If the greenback is knocked off its pedestal as the reserve currency of the world a tsunami of US currency will flood back to the United States making the current inflation look meager and contained. The fed has played, and continues to play, a dangerous game with our currency.
      View article »
    • Fri Feb 22nd 13:01 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      1970s Style Stagflation? I Don't Buy It
      Funny how you miss the most important money supply indicator, M3. Here is a link to a real economist's web site:

      www.shadowstats.com/al...

      Looks like money supply is increasing to me!
      View article »
    • Fri Feb 22nd 12:48 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Inflating Away Debt
      I am under the impression that most government debt is short term and revolves every few months. For the deflation scenario to work, the government would need to push rates to 2% and keep them there for a very long period (forever?). The 2% rates might provide a temporary respite, but won't the underlying problem still be there? Won't they still have a compounding debt problem? The T-Bill rate went from 5.1% in 2006 to 3.8% in 2007, but interest payments still went up. .Won't this eventually undermine the currency, forcing interest rates on the debt back up? Who is going to accept 2% on a bill whose currency value is eroding by 3-4% per year? I believe your point about asset deflation in things like real estate, but I have a hard time believing that the government has the power to precipitate deflation when it needs to create huge amounts of currency to maintain interest payments (even at 2% interest). That doesn't even include the amount of currency that will be repatriated of Iran starts selling oil in Euros, a sum that I don't have a grasp on but must be enormous.
      View article »
    • Thu Feb 21st 18:56 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Lululemon Stock Sours As VC, COO Jump Ship
      Schwetty is a liar. Take a look at the Whole Foods stock price. Nothing but down for over two years. Usually blog liars are more creative than this. Try to come up with one that isn't so easy to debunk next time.

      The Lululemon story makes me laugh. The vast majority of American women would look really, really bad wearing yoga clothes. The clothes might sell on the west coast of Canada where people actually exercise, but there is no way they are going to get any traction in the US where obesity is the norm. The insiders timed it perfectly.
      View article »
    • Wed Feb 20th 01:10 AM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Central Bankers Fueling Global Commodity Inflation
      You are missing a nickname for Mervyn King. How about Swervin' Mervyn?
      View article »
    • Tue Feb 19th 12:56 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Government's Role in the Housing Problem
      You should hand over your Ph.D to Soda. He clearly has a better grasp of economics than you do!
      View article »
    • Mon Feb 18th 03:36 AM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Wachovia: Lower Rates Are Working
      Don't do it, man! WB is toxic waste!

      The idea that the government can keep the Ponzified housing market afloat for the life of those loans seems farfetched to me. The yokels who bought the CDO's for those ARMs have been burned (and hopefully fired for incompetence, but probably not). If WB can't keep pushing that garbage onto "investors", then the interest rates on those ARMs will spike, and then those "homeowners" will be right back in the same spot: too much owing on too little house, with mortgage payments that they cannot make.

      Besides, isn't WB under investigation for aiding and abetting telemarketing fraud or something like that?
      View article »
    • Sun Feb 17th 13:50 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Can Energy Usage Actually Be Reduced without Hurting GDP?
      aaCharley is incorrect on LED efficiency, technology, and disposal.

      LED lights can indeed be made white, but they are slighty less efficient than CFLs (28W CFL = 15.2% overall efficiency; LED =13% overall efficiency). For practical lighting, LEDs need to be able to draw about 1W. They are nowhere near this yet. Although they are efficient, they are not bright enough for standard lighting applications.

      LEDs are not permanent. The white LEDs are particularly prone to failure due to their high phosphor content, which causes them to burn out faster.

      LEDs are manufactured with heavy metals such as gallium arsenide. There is no disposal advantage over CFLs. CFLs contain elemental mercury. Although this gets people excited, it is methylmercury that is toxic, not elemental mercury. When we were kids we used to sneak into abandoned buildings and smash fluorescent lights (they make a cool popping sound) and guess what -we're all fine! In the old days people understood this. There is probably a mercury switch in your thermostat (open it up and look, it isn't hard to do). Is it killing you? Does your liver hurt?

      CFLs are a huge savings over their lifespan. A $90 investment in CFLs is estimated to save $440 - $1500 over a 5 year period.

      Lighting accounts for 9-15% of household electricity usage. I seriously doubt that it accounts for 30% of all electricity usage (think about it).

      The argument about using incandescent bulbs to generate heat is not worth addressingsince it is typical supply-side nonsense that equates waste with economic growth and progress.
      View article »
    • Wed Jan 9th 20:07 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Buy Gold on Emotion, Not Fundamentals!
      Emotion drives the fundamentals??? No Richard, an incompetent Federal reserve drives the fundamentals by pumping up the money supply faster than the economy can absorb it. I hate owning gold (boring, no return, no story, no nothing), but I do because I think that the US dollar is being undermined by a bunch of retards who have somehow taken over the Federal Reserve and Congress.
      View article »
    • Sun Dec 30th 11:42 AM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Short the Loonie! - Barron's
      Hmmm... Canada has a balanced federal budget, a good trade balance, a declining national debt, a good current account balance, a fiscally responsible government, is a commodity-producing country, and has a currency that is increasingly being viewed as "hard money". The US is cutting rates in an inflationary environment. I think I'll pass on that short.
      View article »
    • Wed Dec 26th 16:38 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      A Closer Look At the Gold Price Chart
      Tim's pretty good. Humility is never a bad characteristic in a commentator, unless one is from the rhetoric school. The above comments are simplistic attacks on the writer's character and contain little-to-no useful insight.

      One thing to look at is the gold lease rates at Kitco. Every time the price of gold starts to move the lease rates go down. This is *probably* because the central banks are flooding the market with gold by lending it out at-below market rates. This causes the price of gold to turn back down. The failure of gold to rally then causes retail investors to get very frustrated and, seemingly from the posts, angry.

      In my opinion, there are three scenarios that will cause the price of gold to move much higher:

      1. The central bankers reach zero hour, in which additional monetary priming does not lead to increased aconomic demand (ie they print money but no-one can use it for anything). The people who are first in line to receive the newly minted money, who aren't stupid, will buy gold at that point.

      2. The central bankers run out of gold. This is a long way off.

      3. A commodity-producing nation or group of nations decides that accepting rapidly-devaluing digital bits (ie "money") for their valuable oil is not a fair trade and decide that they want something more tangible. That something could be gold or oil.

      Also, gold should be considered either a speculative play or an insurance policy on wealth. It is not an investment in that it does not generate future cash flow.

      One last point: Most of the formally trained investment advisors that I have dealt with are idiots who are only in the field because their dads got them into it. They have little interest in current event, cannot read a financial statement, have absolutely no knowledge of history, and typically beleive whatever the editorial page of the WSJ tell them to believe. I'd take someone like Tim any day.
      View article »
    • Sat Dec 22nd 15:10 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Foreclosures Have Peaked and It's Time To Buy? Not So Fast
      You can't blame real estate agents; they're just pawns. Not exactly sophisticated, they just push whatever they can to make a buck. Most of them seem to believe that real estate only goes up. It's the people who came up with the garbage loans, the people who insured them, the GSEs like Fannie Mae, and the Federal Reserve system, that are responsible for this mess.
      View article »
    • Mon Dec 17th 13:30 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Going for Gold? It's Overrated
      Gold is not an investment, it is a hedge (insurance policy) against inflation. A well run gold miner with low extraction costs and high cash flow is an investment. As an insurance policy, it is pretty good since it's value does not go to zero at the end of the term.
      View article »
    • Mon Dec 10th 00:50 AM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      The Rough Rider and The Grey Lady: Pennies for Dollars?
      As far as I can tell, NYT does not understand online advertising very well. They don't realize that the power of online advertising is tha ability to tailor ads to the reader of any given article. They need to establish an ability to allow companies with small advertising budgets to advertise online, and direct the ads to likely readers. The Times does not get this at all.
      View article »
    • Thu Dec 6th 00:55 AM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Goldman's Golden Message: Time to Short the Shiny Stuff
      I agree that GS makes a habit of putting out misleading reports. Their SIV dealing would be criminal if they weren't so well connected. I'm still worried about gold, though. The central bankers and affiliated banks like GS have a vested interest in manipulating gold's price. It wouldn't surprise me to see them drive gold down by, for example, dropping the lease rates on gold. They did this in October and November. I firmly believe that gold is an excellent long-term insurance policy on my money.
      View article »
Loading...
Symbols:
Authors:
Quick Links:
Contribute an Article Become a Seeking Alpha Contributor

Transcripts

More Transcripts»