David Rosenberg, chief economist for Gluskin-Sheff, is a contrarian with a superior intellect than our own. That’s why we hang on most every word he says.
“The real danger — economically, socially or politically speaking — in the 1930s was loads of young men without jobs.”
By Adam Lass, Senior Editor, Taipan Publishing Group
This American company has gained 777% the old-fashioned way: selling junk in backroom deals.
As regular readers know, I am a Ford man.
Back when I was a kid, you had to make three really important choices. First, you had to pick a political party. Didn’t matter how well you knew the candidates – you picked a party and that’s what you were.
We are talking Democrat or Republican here. Libertarians weren’t much discussed, and backing the Socialists could get your parents blackballed at work. And if you wanted peace around the dinner table, you just went with the same side your folks did.
Second, you had to choose “your” baseball, basketball and football teams. We didn’t have…
It is a gray morning, here in London. We sit in the building with the golden balls, look out the window, and wonder…
…how does it all work?
In our history, the American nation committed obvious sins against select groups of people, and we’ve paid bitterly for some of that. But now it’s our sins against the land itself that threaten to sink the USA as a viable enterprise.
Personal conversions sometimes mark dramatic turns in history. Saul of Taursus saw a vision so bright it left him blind. The next thing you know, he had changed his name and was pushing Christianity all over the world. According to Gibbon, the Roman Empire fell as a consequence. Then, on the advice of his mistress, Gabrielle, Henry IV became a Catholic, leading to the Edict of Nantes and its subsequent revocation.
In their official statement Wednesday, U.S. Federal Reserve policymakers said they “continue to anticipate that economic conditions are likely to warrant exceptionally low levels of the Federal Funds Rate for an extended period.”
We’ve said it before, more than once: Jobs and housing will be the real indicators for how the depression pans out. Housing led us into this mess, it is one of the worst performing asset classes in America, it’s most people’s biggest investment, and bad mortgages (and their subsequent securitizations) have rendered our financial system impotent — at best. And jobs, well… people gotta work. When they don’t, all kinds of craziness ensues.
The inflation/deflation debate is hot… It crackles and pops like a pine fire. But it gives off little helpful light. Abe Lincoln may have read by the light of an open fire. But when we tried it, we singed our eyebrows. It made us suspicious of Old Abe; maybe he wasn’t quite as truthful as he pretended to be. Later, we realized he was a mountebank. But that’s another story…
The trouble with being a contrarian is that you can never be quite contrarian enough.
