Deflation has kept a bid under the Yen for 20 years, since the huge load of bad debt denominated in that currency creates demand. The Japanese government took advantage of that bid and ridiculously low long-term rates and has issued unpayable quantities of debt, squandering the nation’s current and future wealth on government jobs and [...]

Of course this man doesn’t care a whit for the truth, so he is either an economic ignoramous (quite probable for a French lawyer and politician) or just plain lying when he makes statements like the following:
“If we created the euro, we cannot let a country fall that is in the eurozone,” said Sarkozy yesterday [...]

Another day, another (barely) new low in the Euro:

Prophet.net
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I still think there are good odds for a surprise rally here. We certainly have the set-up: oversold RSI and a positive MACD cross on the daily bar, very low but leveling trader sentiment, and a widely-followed news event to draw in the retail players (the very [...]

My how the times change. Seems only yesterday everyone was expecting the dollar to collapse, when it already had! Now it’s time to fret about its opposite, the euro. I am a major dollar bull for 2010-2011, but when everyone is one one side of a trade that has gone a long way in a [...]

All government debt is a racket, and should be repudiated.
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Widely read investment advisor John Mauldin favors the continued enslavement of the Greek public to corrupt politicians, greedy unions, and German banks. He had this to say today in his email publication:
…if Greece defaults it does not necessarily mean they have to leave the EU, any more [...]

Moveyourmoney.info is apparently a grassroots movement to inspire people to withdraw their savings from the powerful mega-banks and to deposit it in local institutions. The premise is that the big boys blew the bubble and that the little guys sat out the craziness.
It is true that the largest banks are some of the highest-leveraged, that [...]

Kevin Duffy and Bill Laggner are acquaintances of mine who run the Bearing Fund, which returned high double digits for its investors in 2008. Their moral and economic philosophy is grounded in the Austrian understanding of the credit cycle and the parasitic role that government plays in today’s economy. I highly recommend an interview with [...]

Hat tip to Mish for this explanation of how government ruined one of the wealthiest cities in the world:

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Now, if the government had let Chrysler and GM go under, their factories would have been bought by Toyota and Honda and their employees would be turning out cars that people actually want, not gems like the [...]

The bulls cheered when the Department of Commerce told us GDP was 3.5%, but then the estimate was quietly lowered to 2.8%, and now we hear that 2.2% is a more like it. In reality of course, when you take away government expenditures, which should not be in GDP anyway as they are not Production, [...]

From nymag.com comes this diary of a female 24-year-old New Yorker making the best of her 18 months of unemployment insurance:
DAY ONE
Noon: Finally wake up and realize that it’s only noon. Automatically type into SeamlessWeb to order the usual brunch. It’s just too rainy to leave the apartment. Since getting laid off (okay it’s been [...]