The other day had me sharing a cold, congealed chicken salad for lunch with Bill Clinton’s Secretary of  Labor, Robert Reich, at San Francisco’s posh Fairmont Hotel. We covered a wide range of market impacting topics, which I have summarized below. A Rhodes Scholar who dated Hillary Clinton at Yale, ran for governor of Massachusetts, [...]

I am constantly barraged with emails from gold bugs who passionately argue that their beloved metal is trading at a tiny fraction of its true value, and that the barbaric relic is really worth $5,000, $10,000, or even $50,000 an ounce (GLD). They claim the move in the yellow metal we are seeing is only [...]

When I wake up at 4:30 am each morning to check the overnight markets and review the opening salvo of incoming emails, I often have trouble focusing in my groggy state. So I had to blink twice when the first message in my inbox politely inquired if I had time to meet the Secretary of [...]

“Oh, how I despise the yen, let me count the ways.” I’m sure Shakespeare would have come up with a line of iambic pentameter similar to this if he were a foreign exchange trader. I firmly believe that a short position in the yen should be at the core of any hedged portfolio for the [...]

There are a lot of belles at the ball, but you can’t dance with all of them. While a student at UCLA in the early seventies, I took a World Politics course which required me to pick a country, analyze its economy, and make recommendations for its economic development. I chose Algeria, a country where [...]

I always thought that a great strategy for a new hedge fund would be to only buy positions from existing hedge funds that were blowing up. That fund would buy securities subject to margin calls and distressed liquidations, which are by definition at six standard deviation extremes. It would not trade very often, but few [...]

I received some questions last week on my recent solar pieces as to whether I minded paying more money for “green” power. My answer is “hell no,” and I’ll tell you why. My annual electric bill comes to $1,500 a year. Since the California power authorities have set a goal of 33% alternative energy sources [...]

I normally avoid the diplomatic circuit, as the few non committal comments and soggy appetizers I get aren’t worth the investment of time. But I jumped at the chance to celebrate the 61st anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China with San Francisco consul general Gao Zhansheng.   Happy Birthday China! When [...]

When I was growing up in Los Angles during the fifties, the most exciting day of the year was when my dad took me to buy a Christmas tree. With its semi desert climate, Southern California offered pine trees that were scraggly at best. So the Southern Pacific Railroad made a big deal out of [...]