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December 2011

Welcome To The Third World, Part 4: Boomers Reap What They’ve Sown

by John Rubino on December 19, 2011 · 1 comment

It was fun while it lasted. We Baby Boomers got to diss our elders when we were young and borrow without restraint through middle-age. Few generations have traveled such a smooth stretch of financial/psychological highway. But now that we’re…old…the world we created isn’t so congenial. Our savings are inadequate, jobs are scarce, and retirement, as [...]

Welcome To The Third World, Part 4: Boomers Reap What They’ve Sown

by John Rubino on December 19, 2011 · 0 comments

It was fun while it lasted. We Baby Boomers got to diss our elders when we were young and borrow without restraint through middle-age. Few generations have traveled such a smooth stretch of financial/psychological highway. But now that we’re…old…the world we created isn’t so congenial. Our savings are inadequate, jobs are scarce, and retirement, as [...]

Welcome To The Third World, Part 4: Boomers Reap What They’ve Sown

by John Rubino on December 19, 2011 · 90 comments

It was fun while it lasted. We Baby Boomers got to diss our elders when we were young and borrow without restraint through middle-age. Few generations have traveled such a smooth stretch of financial/psychological highway. But now that we’re…old…the world we created isn’t so congenial. Our savings are inadequate, jobs are scarce, and retirement, as [...]

Europe’s Problem, America’s Solution

by John Rubino on December 13, 2011 · 15 comments

Greece has been out of the spotlight for a couple of weeks, which means it’s past due for another market-rattling announcement. And sure enough, today we find out that its economy is shrinking even faster than expected: Greece Apparently Even Worse Off Than Realized, Hitting Euro, Stocks This flew under the radar a little bit [...]

Currency Wars: “Strong Yen Is Destroying Japanese Industry”

by John Rubino on December 12, 2011 · 17 comments

The thing to understand about inflation is that if one major country does it, all the others have to do it too. A single country can benefit by making its currency less valuable, because a falling exchange rate gives its exporters a pricing edge in global markets. But the pop in exports comes at the [...]

This is Europe’s “Powerful” Plan?

by John Rubino on December 8, 2011 · 18 comments

Europe’s leaders have convened another summit meeting that will, they promise, put all the break-up speculation to bed once and for all. But the ideas that were floated pre-meeting are, um, logically challenged. Consider this excerpt from a recent Wall Street Journal article: The Pitfalls of Merkozy’s Third Way …Perhaps the markets are simply relieved [...]

Fooled Again!

by John Rubino on December 2, 2011 · 25 comments

The pattern is by now so familiar that it deserves a place beside other technical indicators like moving averages and Fibonacci retracements. It begins with part or all of the global economy appearing to implode under its five-decade accumulation of debt. The public sector/central bank nexus responds with a liquidity injection, leading the markets to [...]