'I'm long tear gas after the Athens experience. They are going to need that tear gas in Rome and Madrid at some point,' said Steve Cortez at Veracruz Research.

SPECIAL BABY BUST ISSUE Featured Trades: (THE REAL ESTATE MARKET IN 2030) 1) The Real Estate Market in 2030. A number of analysts, and even some of those in the real estate industry, are finally coming around to the depressing conclusion that there will never be a recovery in residential real estate. Long time readers [...]

SPECIAL BABY BUST ISSUE Featured Trades: (THE LONG VIEW OF THE US ECONOMY) 2) The Long View of the US Economy. The retirement of the baby boomers, and the reduced numbers and frugal spending patterns of Generation X, are not only bad news for the real estate market for the next 20 years, they are [...]

Featured Trades: (INDIA VS CHINA), (FXI), (PIN), (INP), (TTM) iPath MSCI India ETN PowerShares India Portfolio ETF Wisdom Tree India Earnings Fund ETF   1) India is Catching Up With China. When I first visited Calcutta in 1976, 800,000 people were sleeping on the sidewalks, I was hauled everywhere by a very lean, barefoot rickshaw [...]

Featured Trades: (INTEGRATING AMERICA'S POWER GRID)   2) Integrating America's Power Grid. Until now, America's power grid has been divided into three unconnected chunks, making transnational transmission impossible, leading to huge regional mispricing. While California and New York suffered from brown outs and sky high prices, electricity was given away virtually for free in Texas. [...]

Featured Trades: (THINK AGAIN BEFORE BUYING THAT VACATION HOME) 3) Think Again Before Buying That Vacation Home. If you're entertaining buying a vacation home any time soon, I'd think again. In my annual review of the residential real estate market in the High Sierra mountain hamlet of Incline Village, Nevada, and I am sad to [...]

'The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see,' said Britain's combative WWII Prime Minister, Winston Churchill.

Featured Trades: (IS THE FAT LADY SINGING AGAIN FOR THE TREASURY MARKET?)   1) Is the Fat Lady About to Sing Again for the Treasury Bond Market? One of my best calls of the year was to pick the bottom of the Treasury bond market in February and pile readers into synthetic long positions by [...]

Featured Trades: (THE WORLD’S LARGEST SOLAR PLANT) 2) The World’s Largest Solar Plant. Unfortunately, I know Blythe, California too well. This natural blast furnace is in a God forsaken corner of the state where I hunted jack rabbits as a kid, the Indians survived on Gila monsters for protein, and it regularly reaches 130 degrees [...]

Featured Trades: (AN EVENING WITH JOSEPH STIGLITZ) 3) Dinner With Joseph Stiglitz . The great thing about interviewing Joseph Stiglitz over dinner is that you don't have to ask any questions. You just turn him on and he spits out one zinger after another. And he does this in a kibitzing, wizened, grandfatherly manner like [...]

Last Chance to Attend The Mad Hedge Fund Trader’s July 18 Chicago Strategy Luncheon. Come join me for lunch for the Mad Hedge Fund Trader’s Global Strategy Update, which I will be conducting in Chicago on Thursday, July 18, 2010. A three course lunch will be followed by a 30 minute PowerPoint presentation and a [...]

Featured Trades: (THERE WILL BE NO QE3!) 1) There will be no QE3! Twice in the last week, rumors surfaced that Ben Bernanke was considering a third round of quantitative easing, first in the Fed minutes, and then in Wednesday's congressional testimony. The risk markets rallied furiously, and then quickly gave it all back. If [...]

Featured Trades: (REPORT FROM EUROPE, PART III) 2) Report From Europe Part III. If you ever need someone to owe you a big favor, make sure it is the world's best hotel. That is what I discovered when I checked into the legendary Cipriani Hotel in Venice, Italy. I had booked their cheapest room at [...]

Featured Trades: (CHINA'S LONG AND WINDING ROAD), (STP), (YGE), (FSLR) 3) China's Long and Winding Road. I spent an evening speaking to Gao Jie, a Beijing civil judge who left the bench to join China's growing environmental movement when her kids came home from school one day coughing and wheezing. You only have to inhale [...]

'The Fed can print money now, but they can't print jobs,' said Keith Wirtz, president of Fifth Third Asset Management.