November 23, 2009 –
I look at the balance sheets of the gold mining companies and I have to just scratch my head. Where are all the profits? Gold is up 9 years in a row, right? So how come you have paid in capital of billions and billions and retained earnings of little or nothing? This is for gold stock after gold stock. I can't find many that look anything like a legitimate business which earns a profit from operations. They are great at selling shares to the public, but when it comes to making money digging yellow metal out of the ground, there is little or nothing to show those shareholders. If someone can find a pure gold mining stock that has more retained earnings on the balance sheet than paid in capital, I would love to see it. This whole industry just stinks by any reasonable measure of business success other than share price, and if they don't have retained earnings after nine good years in a row, what will happen when they get the inevitable bad years? I find it ironic that people supposedly buy gold stocks for safety and they load their portfolios with these junky time bombs. [more]
November 04, 2009 –
I've been reading recently about several high level banking executives who say that religion is on the side of the bankers and Jesus would approve of high pay for bank executives. Apparently, these people have no clue that all three of the Western World's three major religions, Islam, Christianity, and Judaism originally prohibited banking in it's current form. All three religions prohibited "usury", which was defined at that time as charging interest on a loan. [more]
October 22, 2009 –
The United States deficit for fiscal 2009 was about $1,400,000,000,000 (That's one point four trillion dollars) [more]
August 03, 2009 –
Dr. Doom Roubini today threw in the towel. Commodity prices will go up in 2010 after all. The deflationists are finally starting to see that this isn't a re-run of the 1930s. [more]
July 15, 2009 –
The thing many people miss in their analysis of markets these days is the role of well over $1,000 trillion notional value of derivatives. This mountain of bets, this giant casino, now rules the world of finance. The derivatives market consists of bets that lenders will or won't default (credit default swaps), that interest rates won't go up or down (interest rate swaps), that stocks won't go up or down (stock options and futures), that currencies will or won't fluctuate very much (currency options and futures), that commodity prices will or won't fluctuate very much (commodity futures), and loads of other bets that most of us probably can't even imagine. [more]
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