When I was remodeling my 160 year old London house, the chimney was in desperate need of attention. After the bricklayer crawled up the fireplace, he found a yellowed and somewhat singed envelope addressed to Santa Claus. Thinking it was placed there by my kids, he handed it over to me. In it was a
Following Howard Ruff for the last 35 years has always been eye opening, if not entertaining. The irascible Mormon is the publisher of Ruff Times (http://www.rufftimes.com? ), one of the oldest investment letters in the business, and one of the original worshipers of hard assets. The great thing about the end of the world crowd
?The old yardsticks don?t seem to be working anymore,? said Art Cashin, a strategist at UBS.
Traders like to refer to the red metal as Dr. Copper because it is the only one that has a PhD in economics. This year it has been proving its credentials as a great predictor of future economic activity once again. Copper has been leading the downside charge for all risk assets since it peaked
Vietnam has delivered one of the top performing stock markets so far in 2012. Take a look at the Market Vectors Vietnam ETF (VNM). The venture invests in companies that get 50% or more of their earnings from that country, with an anticipated 37% exposure in finance, and 19% in energy. This will get you
As much as my real estate broker insists that the bottom is in for residential real estate, the raw and unvarnished data still does not support that belief. This morning, the February S&P 500 Case Shiller real estate index put in new lows for nine major markets, as well as for both composite indexes. Overall,
?With slowing growth in the US and no growth in Europe, you are going to have to shave a few percentage points off of growth in China. If you look at the chessboard as a retail investor, we have a year or more in a sideways to down stock market,? said Dr. Peter Navarro, a
All eyes will be focused on the weekly jobless claims to be released by the Department of Labor at 8:30 AM EST on Thursday. You may recall that investors did not exactly run the last two weekly reports up the flagpole and salute them, which showed sharp increases in unemployment claims. At this point the
It would be easy to ignore what is happening on the other side of the world, especially when they involve the French. But to do so today in this interconnected and interdependent world would be extremely hazardous to your wealth. When a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil, the tsunami hits Japan. That is exactly
I ran into Minxin Pei, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Who imparted to me some iconoclastic out of consensus views on China?s position in the world today. He thinks that power is not shifting from West to East; Asia is just lifting itself off the mat, with per capita GDP only