Springtime for GameStop
Springtime for Gamestop By Peter Schiff The central idea in the classic Mel Brooks comedy “The Producers” is that unscrupulous Broadway impresarios could succeed fabulously by creating a play so uniquely awful that it would close on its first day. Their idea was to oversubscribe shares to investors, to the point where hundreds of percentages […]
Springtime for GameStop
Springtime for Gamestop By Peter Schiff The central idea in the classic Mel Brooks comedy “The Producers” is that unscrupulous Broadway impresarios could succeed fabulously by creating a play so uniquely awful that it would close on its first day. Their idea was to oversubscribe shares to investors, to the point where hundreds of percentages […]
The Best of Times During the Worst of Times
While most people generally understand that the stock market and the economy do not move in lock step, there is still an underlying belief that a strong market reflects a strong economy. But according to that logic, our current economy must be historically strong. If this strikes you as strange, given that we are in […]
A Black Swan with Teeth
For years I have been warning that during the age of permanent stimulus (which began in earnest with the Federal Reserve’s reaction to the dotcom crash of 2000), each successive economic contraction would have to be met with ever larger, increasingly ineffective, doses of monetary and fiscal stimulus to keep the economy from spiraling into […]
WORLD WAR II WAS FOUGHT WITH SAVINGS NOT DEBT
While the country and the stock markets reel from the impact of the Coronavirus, many economists and politicians are calling for the government to fight the pandemic as if we had to fight the Second World War all over again. In his address from the White House on March 18, President Trump made this comparison […]
The Problem Is the Bubble, Not the Pin
With the markets shell shocked by of the worst weeks on record, analysts are split on whether investors are simply overreacting to the coronavirus epidemic or if we are confronting an actual existential threat to the global economy. While most epidemiologists caution that the virus will be nearly impossible to contain, the good news is […]
Clash of the Titans
In the decades that I have been listening to politicians clumsily trying to explain the economy there has never been a period, with the possible exception of the early Reagan years, in which major party leaders were able to present a solid grasp of economic principles. But I have never seen a time in which […]
Worlds Collide in an Ivy League Classic
Like particles in a super collider, opposing forces of American culture smashed together this past weekend on a historic football field in Connecticut. And like a physics experiment, the resulting impact shed light on the state of the country and provides us all with a ready framed discussion for the Thanksgiving weekend. At halftime of […]
This Is Not a Printing Press
Rene Magritte’s 1929 painting “The Treachery of Images,” depicts a tobacco pipe with a caption that reads “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” (French for “This is not a pipe”). Everyone who has taken a course in modern art knows that Magritte’s exercise in contradiction was meant to draw a distinction between a real thing and […]
Baghdad Donald
For Donald Trump, it seems that these are the best of times except that they are the worst of times. How else to explain his contradictory demand that the Federal Reserve cut interest rates by 100 basis points despite his repeated claims that our current economy is “the best in the history of the United […]
