“U.S. financial firms have taken write downs and losses of $666.1 billion since the beginning of 2007,” according to Bloomberg. There you have it. The number of the bust. The financial end times rolled on yesterday. The latest twist is the decision of U.S. regulators to come to the aid ...read more

“Well, God knows you don’t need any brains to buck barley bags...” — John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men (1937) Alpha used to be what hedge-fund managers promised their clients. Better still, portable alpha — defined in the easy bed-time reading of finance MBAs as the “generation of excess return over a benchmark ...read more

Now to the big subject of the day: Inflation. You’d think evidence of even bigger deficits in the U.S. is clearly inflationary. But not everyone thinks so. The new prophet of doom, Dr. Nouriel Roubini, says at least four factors are setting up what he calls “Stag Deflation” (as opposed ...read more

“...It’s always darkest before it’s pitch black...” You might like to know, if you put store by such things, that the U.S. stock market just sank to a 14-year low against gold. With the Dow Jones index dipping below 9,000 last week, the price of gold held near $850 an ounce — ...read more

Do you remember the 1970 Academy Award-winning movie Patton, starring George C. Scott? In the beginning of the movie, Scott — playing the iconic American Gen. George S. Patton — stands in full dress uniform, backed up by a gigantic American flag. Scott then rouses the troops (and the audience) ...read more

There are only two things gold bulls should worry about from this point forward, now that the general commodity correction is out of the way and the froth has been worked out of the market: deflation in the strict sense of the term (monetary, not asset deflation) or a suddenly ...read more

The approved version of the bailout bill DOES extend the production tax credit (PTC) for renewable energy by one year. This is good news. Under current tax law, the PTC will expire on Dec. 31, 2008. Any renewable energy system that is not installed and running by the end of this ...read more

“Taking the long view, we are running out of dirt.” —David R. Montgomery, geologist Over the summer, Iran bought a large amount — more than ONE million tons — of wheat from the U.S. That’s something we’ve not seen in 27 summers. In Iran’s case, a tough drought cut the wheat harvest ...read more

Have you followed the recent rise in value of the U.S. dollar? Through late summer, the dollar increased in value against the euro, as well as the yen and numerous other currencies. Also, as August rolled on, gold fell from a price over $900 to under $800 per ounce. And oil ...read more

It has been a brutal couple of months for commodities investors. Prices may have temporarily overshot fundamentals on the upside in June. But the opposite situation now exists. The commodity sector wipeout of the last two months has obliterated any froth or excess. And now, prices may overshoot to the ...read more