March 3, 2024 | The Dregs Take Flight
The endgame inched closer to singularity last week with rigged rallies in stocks that had rightfully been given up for dead. There was the more than doubling in the price of Beyond Meat, for example. Until last week, shares of the veggie-burger upstart seemed content to scuddle sideways on a tortuous path to death. […]
February 25, 2024 | The Fallacy of the Wall of Worry
So much for the wall of worry! Optimists and visionaries supposedly climb it while ignoring troublesome signs that leave most investors on the sidelines, paralyzed with fear. Last week, as soaring shares of Nvidia tugged stocks higher around the world, speculators swarmed the wall like cockroaches gorging themselves on dried beer, glue and animal feces. […]
February 18, 2024 | The Coming Crash of Bigness
[Globalism has peaked, says my colleague James Howard Kunstler, and with it a trend toward corporate bigness that has all but extinguished quality and vitality from the marketplace. Bloated corporatism is about to come crashing down, he says, in a process of creative destruction that will allow us to rescale the economy so that it better […]
February 11, 2024 | Even Bulls Are Getting Nervous
However high stocks climb, there will always be an earnest, bespectacled egghead on Wall Street ready to tell us why shares are likely to keep on rising. Here’s Yung-Yu Ma, chief Investment officer for a firm called BMO Wealth Management and a finance professor at Lehigh University: “A better economy, healthy profits and lower inflation,” […]
February 4, 2024 | Wall Street Guns Its Perpetual Motion Engine
Here are a couple of headlines concerning the economy that appeared atop Bloomberg’s front page on the same day last week. Taken together, they could make one’s head spin. First the happy news: IMF Lifts World GDP Outlook on U.S. Strength. But here’s the article just beneath: UPS to Cut 12,000 Jobs. A case of schizophrenia on the […]
January 28, 2024 | Gold Stocks and the Coming Judas Swing
[This week’s commentary was written by David Isham, a longtime Rick’s Picks subscribers from Northern California who has been investing in bullion since he was in grade school four decades ago. RA ] Although gold appears to have broken out of a triple top and recently hit fresh all-time highs at $2152, the gold miners are trading at the […]
January 21, 2024 | Onward and Upward for Perhaps a Little Longer
When forecasting stock prices, it helps to view the market as a crazed creature driven by fear, greed, and most of all, stupidity. Of course, everyone but the “theme”-obsessed chimpanzees who purport to manage your money understands that the stock market’s heedless ascent into horrifying news is rock-bottom stupid. In this case, the very bad […]
January 14, 2024 | Deflating a Weak Argument Against Deflation
Reader Scott Baker took issue last week with my unsettling prediction of a deflationary bust. The mountain of debts that I believe will cause this is really no big deal, says Baker. He quotes economist Michael Hudson to back him up: “Debts that can’t be repaid, won’t be.” That certainly doesn’t sound very menacing. So […]
January 7, 2024 | Advancing the Timeline of Economic Collapse
The stock market is so pumped with hubris, lies and delusions that I’m beginning to doubt whether the bull market will see Microsoft rally to $430 before everything comes crashing down. I’ve been using MSFT as a bellwether because it has been the strongest megacap stock in the world for the last four years, and […]