Talk to any financial advisor or read a book about saving for retirement and the word diversification comes up time and time again. Diversify, diversify, and diversify. Like your mom told you: don’t put all of your eggs in one basket. For too many people, diversification means putting a certain percentage of your money in stocks and the rest in
Howard Ruff is one of the icons of the investment newsletter business. The Ruff Times is one of the most successful newsletters of all time and his book How to Prosper during the Coming Bad Years sold almost three million copies. He is most famous for recommending the purchase of gold at $120/oz in 1975 and more importantly recommending that
Anyone who follows financial markets has to wonder at times, “What are people thinking? How did they come to make those decisions?” It’s hard to imagine that John Muth and Robert Lucas came up with what’s known as the “rational-expectations theory,” wherein, as explained in Wikipedia, it is assumed that outcomes that are being forecast do not
Since two years of zero interest rates, $800 billion in fiscal stimulus, and the bailout of any business remotely viewed as systemically important haven’t resuscitated the dead economy, now the tonic suggested is optimism. American business owners and consumers need to quit getting their daubers down and keep the sunny side up. George Mason
With gold selling for around $1,400 per ounce, it seems like everyone has jumped on the yellow-metal bandwagon. Resource-investment guru Rick Rule said about gold investing recently , “we’re no longer lonely in the gold trade. You couldn’t describe this as a contrarian activity, and you couldn’t describe this as a low-risk activity.” But while
[This article was adapted from a talk delivered at the Mises Circle in Houston, Texas, January 22, 2011.] The stock market has been on a tear and it’s all about mergers and acquisitions (M&A). Last year ended up being a blockbuster for global mergers and acquisitions, with the total number of deals and values both rising by over 20 percent for
During the first-ever Federal Reserve press conference, Fed chair Ben Bernanke said the number of jobs in America was still 7 million behind the number of people employed when the recession began. When asked whether the Fed could do anything about long-term unemployment, Bernanke said the central bank has been fighting it with an aggressive
Jon Corzine told the House Agriculture Committee, “I simply do not know where the money is, or why the accounts have not been reconciled to date.” The public is outraged that the former CEO of bankrupt global financial-derivatives broker and prime dealer in US Treasury securities MF Global doesn’t know where the missing $1.2 billion in client
Wall Street traders, like high-stakes poker players, are a different breed. The constant pressure, the appetite for risk, the ability to think and react in split seconds, all the while calculating odds in their heads that most can’t do with an HP12C. “These guys are a pretty weird bunch,” Dr. Paul Zak says. “They’re very rational and very
When homebuilder Pulte Homes publicly announced that it was cutting the price of its homes in Las Vegas from five to 25 percent, Wall Street and the financial press immediately began sounding the death knell for the Las Vegas housing market. Greg Gieber, an analyst with A.G Edwards & Sons, Inc., typifies the view in the investment community.
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.