I was extremely, almost uncomfortably short for the last couple of weeks, and with the Dow down 175 a few minutes ago, I covered my stock futures shorts and bought a few contracts to hedge up my long-term puts. It’s looking very good for the shorts — dollar up across the board, bond spreads wider, [...]

Thanks to Tim Knight for finding this.

There is lots more, so click here for the full version.
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The cartoonist and Neil Postman think that Huxley got it right, and he certainly saw a lot that Orwell missed. However, I would argue that those who look at today’s society and only see Huxley (sex, drugs and entertainment) [...]

Just in time for failure Friday, Chris Bruner has assembled a list of Texas ratios for all US banks. This data is all publicly available, but is not often assembled in one place. This is a large html file, posted here on Lew Rockwell’s server. It can be searched using the keyboard command Control-X. The [...]

Video link from Lewrockwell.com
Here’s an excerpt from The Law, by Frederic Bastiat, a French classical liberal (today we would say libertarian) economist:
A Fatal Tendency of Mankind
Self-preservation and self-development are common aspirations among all people. And if everyone enjoyed the unrestricted use of his faculties and the free disposition of the fruits of his labor, social [...]

Hat tip Evilspeculator
They counted 48 vacant properties (I presume mostly street-front) from 59th to 14th Streets on 5th Avenue in Manhattan. I don’t have any stats to compare this to, but it is clear that times are not so good for landlords (and their banks) in NYC. I used to live on the same block [...]

This morning’s Breakfast With Dave is good one.
There are so many headwinds confronting the U.S. consumer it’s not even funny. For a look at the new harsh reality of soaring usage of grocery vouchers, as well as other supplements to the household budget, have a look at the grim article on page 2 of the [...]

Graphite here. I remain an ardent deflationist and continue to see strong risks of a continued collapse in asset values in world real estate and equity markets. That said, one key practice in speculation, no matter how strong one’s conviction in a particular trade, is to understand the other side of that trade and how [...]

This is deflation, a contraction of money and credit. Hardy anybody argues about that anymore. So what happens next? Will Obama and the bailout maniacs inflate a new bubble in green energy in their new, green deal? Maybe, but it would only be a limited bubble, not the worldwide craze in any and all non-dollar [...]

“Even Hitler got whacked in gold stocks”

If this is ‘29, we’ll dip down to new lows in the next few days (tomorrow?) and then rally for five months before getting back to business for two more years of a crushing bear market. The analogous endpoint would be summer 2010 and Dow 1400.
We should be so lucky this time, since we have [...]