Money and Finance
Felix Zulauf's Market Prognosis - June 2012
Found via Zero Hedge.
There is too much debt in the industrialized world and the financial system is virtually bust. Real disposable income is stagnating or declining. Employment participation keeps heading south. This produces a chain reaction: Weaker consumer demand in the West weakens manufacturing in places like Asia, which weakens natural-resource producers such as Austrailia or Brazil.
As for the euro, it is a misconstruction. As I said in January, I expect the disintegration to begin in the second half of this year. That should lead the world into financial and economic chaos. My two major themes into 2013 are euro disintegration and China weakness, due to the bursting of a real-estate boom.
The global economy is weakening cyclically on top of a highly fragile credit system. It is an explosive cocktail. The tower of debt is compounded by the gigantic over-the-counter derivatives market. In the past 10 years the notional value of derivatives worldwide has grown from $100 trillion to almost $800 trillion. The numbers are mind-boggling. If something goes wrong in the real economy, it could shake the whole credit system dramatically. It is a dangerous situation.
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Bill Gross – February 2013 Investment Outlook: Credit Supernova!
Economist Hyman Minsky did. With credit now expanding, the sophisticated economic model provided by Minsky was working its way towards what he called Ponzi finance. First, he claimed the system would borrow in low amounts and be relatively self-sustaining...
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Richard Duncan Quotes
Longer excerpt from The New Depression (taken from my Kindle highlights, so the excerpts aren’t necessarily the paragraphs I have put them in below, and there may be things in between that I didn’t highlight).The quantity theory of money held that...
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Richard Duncan Quotes
Another longer excerpt from The New Depression (taken from my Kindle highlights, so the excerpts aren’t necessarily the paragraphs I have put them in below, and there may be things in between that I didn’t highlight). I've been posting a lot of...
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Chou Funds: 2012 Semi-annual Report
Found via the Corner of Berkshire & Fairfax. Following up on a past letter, we continue to believe U.S. financial institutions are very cheap and TARP warrants associated with these companies are an attractive way to invest in them. Depending on the...
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Prem Watsa's 2011 Shareholder Letter - Fairfax Financial
We continue to fully hedge our common stock portfolios as our concerns about the United States discussed in our 2010 Annual Report persist, and have been magnified by the financial crisis in Europe, including the underlying austerity programs, and the...
Money and Finance