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January 2012

A Shrinking Trust Horizon — And Hard Times In The City

by John Rubino on January 29, 2012 · 31 comments

Nicole Foss, who under the pen name Stoneleigh co-edits the Automatic Earth website, just did a long-form interview with an Italian magazine where she lays out her peak energy, societal collapse thesis in the coherent, accessible way that fans of her writing have come to expect. One part was especially interesting: When you have economic [...]

Fed To Markets: Buy Gold And Silver

by John Rubino on January 25, 2012 · 21 comments

The Fed just spoke. Here’s a slightly edited transcript: Blah blah blah … the economy has been expanding moderately … blah blah blah boilerplate inanity blatant lie … the Committee seeks to foster maximum employment and price stability …. To support a stronger economic recovery and to help ensure that inflation, over time, is at [...]

Why Isn’t Illinois A Bigger Story Than Greece?

by John Rubino on January 22, 2012 · 79 comments

As the Greek default (and it is a default no matter what they end up calling it) is finalized this week, the consensus seems to be that failure to reach a deal would cause a global financial apocalypse. That may be true. And if it is, why aren’t we more worried about Illinois? It’s more [...]

Precious Metals Stocks: Diversify, Seriously

by John Rubino on January 20, 2012 · 5 comments

Gold and silver mining stocks will be the dot-coms of the second half of this decade. Yet most of the people who bet on them will lose money because they ignore the first rule of speculative sectors, which is that no matter how well the sector does, most of its constituent companies will fail. This [...]

Are We Really Going To Bomb Iran?

by John Rubino on January 16, 2012 · 57 comments

Just based on national balance sheets, 2012 will be somewhere between challenging and catastrophic. But debt and deficits might be the least of our near-term problems if Jim Rickards is right. In his latest King World News interview he predicts yet another war, “sooner rather than later”: Iran will not be allowed to have a [...]

What If Your Broker Goes Bust?

by John Rubino on January 14, 2012 · 6 comments

If investing seems harder than it used to, you’re not imagining things. U.S. stocks are down from a decade ago, the gold/silver miners haven’t kept up with the underlying metals, and though Treasury bonds have done pretty well, only a lunatic would count on them going forward. And now that MF Global has crashed and [...]

For Europe, Every Day Is A New Adventure

by John Rubino on January 12, 2012 · 7 comments

Europe’s parade of surreal financial news just keeps coming. This week, investors are paying Germany to take their money by accepting negative interest rates on new government debt: Germany Issues Bills With Negative Yields As Economists Agree Country Is In Recession Continuing the schizoid overnight theme, we look at Germany which just sold €3.9 billion [...]

Complex Systems, Dysfunctional Industries, and Catastrophic Collapse

by John Rubino on January 8, 2012 · 41 comments

Over the holidays we tempted fate by booking a multi-stage plane trip … and ended up with cancelled flights, missed connections, and blank-faced airline employees who sincerely didn’t care if we spent a night or a week on the terminal floor. While I wallowed in self pity over this loss of control, my wife noted [...]