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I don't like the Fed at all, but my beef with the folks around here is that a) they think it's part of some vast conspiracy, and b) they personalize it with insults to Bernanke and Greenspan, which is both silly and rude. As for a central bank being a cornerstone of the Communist Manifesto...

Eh, feel free to be rude. It's the Internet.

huh?

Since Reagan and Thatcher reintroduced the US and the UK to the markets, the cycles have gotten much longer and much more stable. This is a typical midcourse correction in what by now is a fairly typical 8 to 10 year economic cycle. Shorter term, the wisdom of Ed Hart holds: the surest...

Japan is a semi-socialist one party state, in no way comparable to the US. It should come as no surprise that a lowering of the price of money did nothing for them, because price never did control that economy. Politics and gangsters did, and still do. Here in the US, a lowering of the price of...

Have to agree. It would be too easy for the market to close up tomorrow, and the market is not an eleemosynary pursuit, to quote the late, lamented Ed Hart.

Close to zero (.6%, to be morbidly exact), and not actively managing, by the criteria in the poll. A little better year-over-year (2.98%). But, I target 8% per year for long-term performance (I'm at nearly 14% over a two-year time frame, just slightly below my target, which is not bad...

Tonight's prize for economic illiteracy. It's amazing how regularly this crap gets churned out around here. Three-month bills, to quote Bloomberg, "climbed this week, sending three-month bill yields below 3 percent for the first time since August, as concern over banks' willingness to lend...

....in which case rates should go lower. A LOT lower. The gov't debt market is saying so, loud and clear. Most of us go by the assumption this will end in the Seventies. It could just as easily end in the Thirties. Which means, it doesn't have to end up in inflation; it could easily be a...

What utter nonsense. What ended all that war in Europe was MAD - Mutually Assured Destruction. Best comment I ever heard was by Ed Hart on FNN in the middle of the euphoria over the fall of the communists. He said, roughly quoting from memory, "This idea that peace is coming is fatuous. These...

Most of the money I have comes from making macro trades. I got out completely in the spring of '99, when I had a choice between buying a house and keeping the money in the market and renting. I did some projections, looked around at what was happening, and figured that in a couple of years at...

What's bad is the lack of capitulation this time. There's way too much anticipation of a bottom still. Another really good day of selling or two is needed to finally and definitively get everyone busted and disgusted.

We interrupt the gazillionth dollar bashing thread for a bit of actual wisdom: 1 - Yes, we're at the foothills of a major gold bull market (although the volatility could give you whiplash if you're not careful). 2 - However, the euro is next. Yes, the euro. If any of you actually bothered...

Congrads. You get the prize for the most economically illiterate post I've had the misfortune to read on this misbegotten board. That no one is laughing at the breathtaking idiocy on display here speaks volumes about this board. Precisely the course you advise the Fed to follow is what they...

Same thing was being said in the late seventies and 80's, that the US was falling behind Japan. Now it's China. What happened to Japan? They reached the limit of the growth they could have, given a one-party, mercantilist model that disallowed immigration. When they were playing catch-up they...

A spectacular decline like this accompanied by the worldwide publicity this is getting is an obvious contrarian play. My rule is: the greater the publicity, the more suspect a move is. This one is getting huge publicity, and that makes it extremely suspect. I was happy to be long gold - and...

You're off by one dead President. If they learned about the 22nd (and 24th), Grover Cleveland, they might learn something about the value of the dollar. And about what a proper President who respects the Constitution does after he's elected.

Retail's already getting hit. Transports are next up, as the domestic economy slows even as exports pick up. Reported GDP will look good, employment will be fine, but retail sales and therefore transportation stocks will get hit.

Now I know what that last digit in your username is for: your mental age. Really, do you consider this to be a stunning display of wit? Don't bother answering: it's a rhetorical question. That means, <a href="http://grammar.about.com/od/rs/g/rhetquesterm.htm" target="'">I'm not expecting an...

We had a decent system after the 1986 tax reform: two brackets, reduced number of deductions, and equal treatment of capital gains. Both sides of the spectrum got a little out of that, and the code was greatly simplified. A realistic proposal would be to go back to that 1986 schema. It's an...