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2011 Predictions Half Year Update
Today marks the end of the first half of 2011, so it is time to return to my 2011 Predictions to see how I have done so far this year. For ease in evaluation I will re-post each prediction in its entirety, followed by evaluation and commentary. OVERALL THEMES Cohesion – The economies of the world will finally start to move more in lock step than they have since the Great Recession ensued. Until now some economies have emerged from the recession growing more quickly than others. While others have been laggards. 2011 will witness a...
read moreEgyptian ‘Revolution’ Update
On 15 February, 2011 I wrote a post entitled, “Archetypes Are Obscuring the Understanding of Egypt” that was about the unrest in Egypt that was then unfolding. My specific focus was about how people’s, including the press’s, obsession with archetypes was obscuring an understanding of the reality on the ground in Egypt. I stressed that to understand what was really happening in Egypt required ignoring the archetypal story and actually paying attention to what was taking place there. I said: “Former President...
read moreChinese Auditors Find Lies
Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal ran a story that only confirmed my worst fears about the quality of Chinese financial data. In short, the piece, entitled “Auditors Sharpen Queries in China,” catalogs a series of lies found by auditors of Chinese businesses. For example, one of the very easiest things for an auditor to confirm anywhere else in the world besides China is the cash that a business has. The reason this is easy to confirm is that the auditors simply call the banks where the cash is on deposit and ask for an...
read moreNew Measure of Economic Efficiency
Yesterday morning I played around with some statistics in pursuit of an economic efficiency rating that could be used to compare two economies to one another. What I have come up with is simple and, hopefully, compelling. You could evaluate the continents of the planet just by sheer economic output, or total 2010 gross domestic product (GDP): Europe: $19,920 billion; 32.9% of total North America: $17,503 billion; 28.9% of total Asia: $16,774 billion; 27.7% of total South America: $3,990 billion; 6.6% of total Africa: $1,184 billion; 2.0% of...
read moreDebt Wave Still Growing
For almost three years now I have been highlighting the dangers of an entire world that consumes more than it creates; read: uses debt to extend its means. Most recently I talked about this issue on 31 May, 2011 in my post entitled, “Top 5 Problems Facing the Economy: Chronic Fat, That is Spending Beyond Our Means.” The problem is that if the world kept its accounts honestly then those that borrow money would do so by finding a willing lender. That is, those with a surfeit of resources find those with an excess of resources to...
read moreStats About China’s Classes
Yesterday I read a fascinating piece published by that scion of geopolitical intelligence, Stratfor, entitled: “The Importance of China’s Rising Middle Class.” Rather than summarizing the piece I wanted to talk about several of the remarkable statistics from their analysis. First, guess the size of China’s middle class as a percentage of its total population? Would you believe that, according to the Chinese Academy of Social Science (CASS), China’s middle class is a scant 8% of their population? That still...
read more28 June 2011: Jason Apollo Voss’ Interview with Holistic Living Radio
Please tune into my upcoming interview with Holistic Living Radio’s Tina Marie and Todd Alan on Tuesday, 28 June, 2011 at 1:00pm EDT. I will be speaking with the dynamic duo for the full hour about The Intuitive Investor: A Radical Guide for Manifesting Wealth.
read moreHistorical S&P 500 Graph Shows Bubbles
To my remembrance today’s post represents a first for the “What My Intuition Tells Me Now” blog: a graph! Specifically, a graph that shows the adjusted closing prices of the Standard & Poors 500 Index from January 1950 through 22 June, 2011. The reason I want to put this graph up is that very typically graphs of such a long history are rarely shown. More typically graphs will go back 10 years at the most. The problem with this is that it obscures just how bizarre the world of investing has been since the early 1980s....
read moreNew Hedge Fund SEC Reporting Rules
Yesterday the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission finally released its long-anticipated rules for hedge fund reporting. As I have long argued regulators cannot do their job if they are blind to the risks in the financial system. Because of QIB (qualified institutional buyer) rules hedge funds, private equity funds and venture capital funds have lone eluded regulations aimed at increasing regulatory transparency. From my point of view it’s difficult not to be a critic of a capitalism that believes in an asymmetry of information...
read moreBears on Chinese Economy Start Growling
News is starting to trickle through the financial press this morning that several well known hedge fund managers are placing bets against the Chinese Yuan. That’s a fancy way of saying that they expect the value of the Yuan to decline. Such a thing would be in conjunction with a Chinese economic bubble popping and collapsing Chinese gross domestic product (GDP). What does this mean? When a country has attractive goods, services and investments for sale then the rest of the world has demand for that country’s currency. After...
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