Although off its highs for the day, the Japanese Yen is still looking very strong against every major currency. Earlier, it pushed as high as 92 yen to the dollar. Jim Rogers was on Bloomberg saying it was headed much higher.

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The United States had been living beyond its means for a very long time before the credit crisis finally hit. The truth of the matter is that U.S. monetary and fiscal policy rewarded risk-taking and leverage at the expense of prudence and saving.
The goal of government it seemed was to avoid the pain of [...]

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Yesterday, I said that investors would begin to focus on the real economy now that the financial crisis has eased somewhat due to massive government intervention. Today, retail sales figures for September 2008 were released by the United States and they were much worse than expected. As a result, shares have dropped, with [...]

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The last time faced a recession and a Bear Market of such viciousness was 35 years ago in the recession of 1973-1975. In the UK, it was truly horrific as inflation shot up to 25% and stocks dropped more than 90% in inflation-adjusted terms.
The Bear market of 1973-1974 simply does not get enough press. [...]

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If the huge sell-off on Wall Street, the gaping up of LIBOR, the halt of credit liquidity everywhere, the nationalisation of financial institutions and the enormous TED spread are not enough to convince you that we are headed for a deflationary world, then the sell off in commodity currencies should!
Just two months ago, mining giant [...]

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Is the U.S. in recession or not?
Well, the U.S. printed a 3.3% number for growth in the second quarter according to the data released last week. Since then, I have been asking myself why we shouldn’t believe the U.S. is in an expansion right now. After all, the economy does not normally grow 3.3% [...]

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For every business cycle since 1929, when U.S. unemployment data was first calculated, when the unemployment rate has gone up more than 1% in one year’s time, this has spelled recession. Moreover, the unemployment rate has never risen 1.0% in a year’s time without a recession (no false positives). The unemployment rate, therefore, [...]

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The global economy is in the relatively unique but unenviable position of being bullied by both recession and inflation at the same time. This leaves central banks in a bit of bind. The Federal Reserve has thrown all caution to the wind and cut rates in a reflationary ploy rivaling its actions during [...]

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Back in May, I showed you a chart of Total U.S. Debt which demonstrated that the United States was an increasingly indebted country. This chart was for all domestic debt minus financials and it topped out at about 225% of GDP.
Below is the same chart for the U.S., except this time I have added [...]

Five-year returns almost never exceed 100% (denoted by the dotted red line in the chart). There are three notable bubble periods in stocks above 100%: pre-1929, pre-1987 and pre-1999*. This is not one of those periods.