Ask the average guy on the street — Main or Wall — about what caused the meltdown on Wall Street in 2008, and you might get “greed,” or “arrogance,” or “too much leverage,” or “too little regulation,” or a blank stare. After all, the arcane world of mortgage securities was new. After the dot-com bust, Wall Street needed products to make money on.
Eric Coffin captured the overall bear market funk that permeated this year’s Hard Asset Investment Conference in Las Vegas when he opened his presentation with, “This market stinks. No really, it stinks.” Coffin, co-proprietor of the Hard Rock Analyst, didn’t have many stock picks, so he suggested that attendees “drink heavily” and “don’t get out
Comedian Jay Leno recently had a bit about pilots wanting passengers to take on the responsibility of subduing terrorists on the plane. “First I had to start pumping my own gas, then I had to scan my own groceries at the checkout counter, now in order to fly, we must be responsible for making sure terrorists don’t hijack the planes?” Yes, a cruel
[This article originally appeared in Liberty Watch magazine .] Once upon a time, a house was just the place you lived. But once The Maestro (a.k.a. Alan Greenspan) stepped on the monetary gas back in 2001 and 2002, houses went from being shelter and expenses to investment vehicles. “Working on the problem like a gorilla trying to do long
Spring is in the air signaling the start of homebuying season. But here in Las Vegas, buyers “are aplenty,” 1st Realty Group owner Thomas Blanchard tells the Las Vegas Review Journal , but “we just don’t have the properties to sell them.” It hardly seems possible, not enough homes for sale. After all, squatting in bank-owned homes has become a
In a bit of holiday news no one will care about, the Treasury announced it would return to selling twenty-year treasury bonds to aid in funding the nation’s trillion-dollar deficit. It was 1986 when the Treasury last issued twenty-year paper. Of course the question is: who or what will be the buyers? Daniel R. Amerman, CFA , is keeping a steady
The SPDR S&P Homebuilders ETF closed the other day at 45.65 , poking higher than February 2006’s 44.70. The conventional wisdom is: “Teamed with a resilient job market, low mortgage rates have helped boost home buyer demand,” Matthew Speakman, an economist at real estate data provider Zillow, told CNBC . “An extreme shortage of for-sale listings,
The year 2006 seems like a lifetime ago. The housing boom seemed to be going full throttle, but danger lurked. I wrote on LewRockwell.com in March of that year, concerning a Las Vegas real estate seminar, that “nary a discouraging word was spoken.” But despite the happy talk coming from the podium that day, pleasing the thirteen hundred attendees,
“Russia, Russia, Russia,” the current president used to sarcastically chastise opponents for wondering about 2016 election tinkering from Putin’s principality. Recent MAGA rallies featured “Covid, covid, covid,” with President Trump complaining that the press could think of nothing else. In investmentland, it’s “Bitcoin, bitcoin, bitcoin,” again
Construction lending juggernaut Bank OZK made news when its shares fell 17% after Citigroup analyst Benjamin Gerlinger wrote in a report that cut his rating to “sell.” Bloomberg reported “Bank OZK faces ‘largely idiosyncratic’ exposure to life sciences relative to peer banks,” with a $915 million loan on the Research and Development District on
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.