Not much happened yesterday. The Dow fell 47 points. The newspapers attributed the reversal to surprisingly low consumer confidence numbers. Apparently, consumers aren’t so sure this crisis is over. As we reported yesterday, they’re saving money… maybe even at an 8% rate.
“Investing in agriculture today will be like investing in the oil sector in 2001-2002,” writes Mark McLornan in the May issue of Marc Faber’s Gloom Boom & Doom Report. McLornan runs a fund that invests in farmland. Some of his on-the-ground observations confirm many of the things I’ve been telling my readers for the past several years.
From the tidal wave of e-mails and comments I have received from numerous different sources I am under the impression that most investors view the recent rally in the world’s stock markets as a bear market rally. I suppose we would need to define a bear market rally as a rally that fails to make a new all-time high (for the S&P 500, above the 1576 reached in October 2007) and is also followed by a new low for this cycle (below 666 for the S&P 500 reached in early March 2009).
The rally is on! The Dow rose another 246 points last week. Enjoy it while it lasts…but keep those trailing stops tight. The “End of the Rally is Nigh,” says Barron’s.
Gloom, Boom & Doom report editor Marc Faber last week cast doubt on the effectiveness of the coordinated interest-rate cuts by international central banks. He said “artificially low interest rates” were the main cause of the credit-market turmoil in the first place. Mr. Market may have different ideas. Stocks are way up today.
The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers (NYSE:LEH) is “quite favorable,” says Gloom, Boom & Doom Report publisher Marc Faber.
“The air will be clean within the next one month and we can get a fairly good rebound starting from the middle of October until the spring of next year,” he said in a Bloomberg Television interview.
Faber also warns that AIG (NYSE:AIG) may be a “much bigger problem” than Lehman…
With all the recent downturns in the markets, many investors aren’t sure where to put their money. Dr. Marc Faber, however, sees a light – albeit, a dim light – at the end of the tunnel, and offers some advice.
In the conclusion of this two-part essay, Dr. Marc Faber discusses what America needs to do to truly fix its energy consumption problem – a long-term solution, not a temporary Band-Aid.
With crude oil prices climbing above $117 a barrel investors are looking for oil price predictions and gas price predictions that may give them clues about oil’s trajectory.
Marc Faber, author of the Gloom Boom & Doom Report, argues that a slowdown in the Chinese economy could put downward on oil prices.
“Let us assume that the unthinkable happens,” says Marc in The Daily Reckoning. “China’s economy slows down sharply, or even contracts – and there are reasons why it could.
The US, which most economists now agree is on the brink of recession, could be facing a slew of bank failures as a result of the ongoing credit crisis.
“We’re going to have some more bank failures that will come back more to historical norms and may go above that with time,” said John Dugan, the US comptroller of currency in an interview with the Financial Times. “That is a natural consequence of the economy going from historically exceptionally benign credit conditions to something that is more normal to something you would get in a downturn.”