Taleb thinks hyperinflation is a strong enough possibility to justify way OTM bets on gold (long) and bonds (short). The one bit I agree with is the long gold / short stocks play (though I think gold is likely to fall with stocks, just not as much), and I suspect that deflationist Hendry would concur.
Hendry [...]

A friend just sent me a link to this excerpt of Michael Lewis’s new book, The Big Short. It’s the chapter about  Michael Burry, a California recluse who emersed himself in mortgage bond prospectuses, figured out that it was an historic bubble, and then convinced Goldman and other TBTF banks to write his value fund [...]

Thanks to Pej for finding this:

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Chanos relays a great quote from Milton Friedman: He was brought to watch the Chinese built a canal, and when he asked why they were using shovels and not bulldozers, he was told that machinery was being eschewed in order to create more jobs. Friedman replied with something like, “Oh, [...]

According to Bloomberg, the big bears are circling China.
Marc Faber, publisher of the Gloom, Boom & Doom Report, says China is overdoing it. “It does not make sense for China to build more empty buildings and add to capacities in industries where you already have overcapacity,” Faber told Bloomberg Television on Feb. 11. “I think [...]

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 [...]

I want to offer a little praise here for Mish Shedlock, an investment advisor for Sitka Pacific and proprietor of the hugely successful blog, globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com. I owe Mish a debt of gratitude as one of the writers who helped me understand our credit money system and anticipate the events of the last couple of years. [...]

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 [...]

Thomas Woods, Jr., PhD, Prepared Testimony in Support of HR 1207, The Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2009, House Financial Services Committee, September [...]

Why shouldn’t someone walk away from overbearing consumer, student or mortgage debt, so long as it is non-recourse? I can’t think of any reason to keep servicing debt if you have no hope of repaying the principal. What good is a high FICO score if you don’t want to run up another credit card balance [...]

For your amusement, here’s Bernanke a couple of years ago doing his best to downplay our problems:

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To the dismay of many a fair-minded observer, Bernanke the Fool has been nominated for another term as Fed chairman. My comment is, so long as there is a Fed, who cares who runs it? The chairman, like the [...]