Observations, Calculations, and Values
The crowd sourced questions don’t necessarily result in better questions, but it did make for an interesting interview. The interviewer is The Wall Street Journal’s Deputy Managing Editor, Alan Murray, who asked the most popular questions selected from the Digg Community.
Question: #2) # Goldman Sachs is a large, profit seeking company which you were/are [...]
It’s amazing to me that as bad as our economy has been doing over the last year, there are a whole lot of countries whose currency has fallen relative to the dollar. The below graphic, courtesy of Mint.com, shows the performance of various currencies against the dollar for the two year time period from [...]
You may not like Jim Cramer, but it’s hard to argue with his concept that there’s always a bull market somewhere. In 2009, the bull market is in US Treasury bonds. The chart below, which Paul Kedrosky pointed out, shows the yield on the 30 year treasury, according to Yahoo. It [...]
It’s easy to bring down inflation — just change the definition of what gets measured. Such is the case made in the above chart by John Williams of Shadow Government Statistics. According to the website, “The CPI chart [above] reflects our estimate of inflation for today as if it were calculated the same [...]
Todd Sullivan’s Value Plays reports that David Einhorn posted the below in his recent shareholder letter.
I wonder if he follows suit with Osmium. Bermuda based Osmium Capital Management, not to be confused with the San Francisco based small cap investor of the same name, has decided to offer special classes of their funds [...]
His is a simple and compelling thesis that we can’t bail our way out of the problems that we’ve created. His comparison to the events of the 1930s are particularly interesting.
and here’s Jim Rogers calling it like he sees it:
In hindsight, the case for low yielding gold looks pretty compelling in hindsight, especially when considered against holdings of other liquid assets, like low yielding treasuries. It’s hard for me to believe that over the last year, gold has outperfomed the S&P by 40%.
Source:
http://seekingalpha.com/article/111223-gold-topped-all-currencies-in-2008?source=yahoo
I’m pretty sure that short term rates can’t go any lower. At least not much lower. I don’t think they can be negative, but at 0.01%, it kinda makes you wonder.
Source:
US Treasury
http://www.ustreas.gov/offices/domestic-finance/debt-management/interest-rate/yield.shtml
I like the above graph showing the federal debt levels over time, segmented by presidency. It’s the same story as what I showed here, but a better graphical representation.
As I wrote about a month and a half ago, it’s news to just about nobody that the central banks of the world are expanding their balance sheets. But the scale of the Fed’s expansion left my eyes popped.
The below chart shows total Federal Reserve credit, which now stands at over $2 trillion, [...]