This chart (courtesy of Mish), shows that contrary to hype, retail has not recovered to anywhere near pre-crash levels, though the consumer culture is still very much alive.
About the only thing he got wrong was his prediction that the financial collapse would be inflationary, but of course he called gold correctly (it was about $300 at the time).
Good interview on Bloomberg today – follow this link, since Bloomberg has disabled embedding.
Jump to 1:05 for the action.
From Mish:
The German 30 year bond is yielding 2.8%:
bloomberg.com
The US 30 year bond is yielding the same:
Yahoo Finance
There is no margin of safety in Germany debt against the strong likelihood that the country will be forced (by Merkel and other banker tools) to absorb the losses of the rest of Europe.
Of course, there is no margin in safety in US bonds either at this price, certainly not enough to compensate for the probability of trillion dollar deficits forever. I expect yields to stay low through this cyclical bear market, but not much beyond that. Bonds will continue to be a good short at times when they are overbought, and we may be approaching such a time.
Here’s the 10-year chart, created from data provided by liv-ex.com:
Wine investing is a silly fad, since very few wines improve beyond a few years (this index does not track the same bottles – it’s components are continuosly updated). Most wines are undrinkable after 10-25 years, with exceptions like a few sweet wines such as Tokaji and Eisweins, in which the sugar acts as a preservative (5000 y/o Egyptian honey is still good). How is an amateur to know when to sell a wine before it expires, or even find a buyer for such an illiquid asset? I suspect that most new investors aren’t even aware that even very expensive wines can expire virtually worthless. A few sharpies in France and California may be making a lot of dough off newbies.
