Beefy

So, equities have continued their slow but steady march upward since I last wrote about the economy. Inflation hasn’t really made an appearance as some forcasters would have had you believe. I found myself almost agreeing with David Brooks today:
Here’s one way to look at the politics of our era: We’ve moved from The Age [...]

Anti-Peak

 
 
Peak oil has become a popular meme over the past several years, its popularity bolstered by websites like The Oil Drum, Energy Bulletin, Daily Reckoning and others. The mainstream media has also amplified the message of the oil scare, especially during the massive run-up in oil prices that ended with the financial crash last year. I [...]

Hyper-Skeptical Optimism

 
Today, I felt preternaturally pissed off as I was working out at the gym watching CNBC cover the last hour of today’s market rally. I couldn’t figure out why I felt angry. It was interspersed with some happiness due to the knowledge that higher stock prices, at least in the short run. After some more [...]

Blood in the Streets

I’ve wrote yesterday about some of my frustration and ambivalence about reading about the economy. Today, I can’t say that I did much less of it. I either have poor self-control, or some part of myself is attempting to send a message to the upper reaches of my brain. I had some thoughts while waiting [...]

Human Horticulture

Why is it so hard to get ahead?
In establishment literature, the American economy is frequently referred to as a dynamic free market, the most productive economy in the world, an engine of unstoppable wealth creation.
The glowing language does not ring true for the majority of people, who find themselves shepherded into stultifying “careers” in which [...]

Default?

Barron’s hates America.

Trillions are no hyperbole. The Treasury is set to borrow $550 billion in the current quarter alone and $368 billion in the first quarter of 2009. “Near-term pressures on Treasury finances are much more intense than we had thought,” Goldman Sachs economists commented when the government announced its borrowing projections last week.
It may [...]

Scale

It’s easy to lose track of the massive scale of the philosophical error that surrounds us. Contradictions do not exist in reality, but core contradictory beliefs always result in catastrophe when people attempt to apply them to the real world. One example of this is the belief that the application of aggressive violence can result [...]

Crash Hype

It seems that just about every day now, bloggers and commenters are calling for a significant market crash. I suppose that it alleviates some anxiety for these people, because it provides the illusion that they can predict what literally millions of independent actors are going to do on the day. Futures markets can be fairly [...]

Dosvidanya

Governments are deadbeats.
Russia’s financial crisis is escalating with lightning speed as foreigners pull funds from the country and the debt markets start to price a serious risk of sovereign default.
The cost of insuring Russian bonds against bankruptcy rocketed to extreme levels yesterday. Spreads on credit default swaps (CDS) reached 1,123, higher than Iceland’s debt before [...]

Human Capital

All wealth is the product of human ingenuity.
From an economic perspective, the spread of philosophy has the effect of liberating vast amounts of human capital within individuals that is otherwise enslaved to irrational myths, to fictional concepts like the famliy or the government. What I mean by this is that it takes a great deal [...]