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A Shrinking Trust Horizon — And Hard Times In The City

by John Rubino on January 29, 2012

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 [...]

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Fed To Markets: Buy Gold And Silver

by John Rubino on January 25, 2012

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 [...]

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Why Isn’t Illinois A Bigger Story Than Greece?

by John Rubino on January 22, 2012

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 [...]

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Are We Really Going To Bomb Iran?

by John Rubino on January 16, 2012

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 [...]

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For Europe, Every Day Is A New Adventure

by John Rubino on January 12, 2012

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 [...]

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Complex Systems, Dysfunctional Industries, and Catastrophic Collapse

by John Rubino on January 8, 2012

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 [...]

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

by John Rubino on December 19, 2011

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 [...]

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Europe’s Problem, America’s Solution

by John Rubino on December 13, 2011

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 [...]

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Currency Wars: “Strong Yen Is Destroying Japanese Industry”

by John Rubino on December 12, 2011

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 [...]

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This is Europe’s “Powerful” Plan?

by John Rubino on December 8, 2011

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 [...]

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