The Sizemore Investment Letter

I know in advance that I’ll get hate mail for writing this article, but I’m going to do it anyway.   It’s a subject important enough to justify the inevitable abuse.  You bet the wrong way on inflation, and it may cost you your nest egg. Inflation is one of those topics best not discussed at [...]

In an interview with Henry Blodget this week, Gary Shilling expained that the “Japan train wreck was accelerating.” It is easy to dismiss Shilling as just another Japan doomsayer.  They have been plenty of analysts and money managers over the past 20 years who have forecast the country’s impending collapse, and yet Japan continues to [...]

As a wise man by the name of Yogi Berra once said, “It’s déjà vu all over again.”  This is how investors feel about Greece at the moment. 2011 was the year of risk on / risk off. Virtually all risky assets—including stocks, commodities, energy, non-Treasury debt, and non-dollar currencies—rose and fell together based primarily [...]

A picture is worth a thousand words: The ECB’s efforts to halt the European sovereign debt crisis have left the bank with a bloated balance sheet that is likely to get a lot bigger. If Spanish or Italian bond yields have another upward spike, expect the ECB to come to the rescue–whether Germany’s Angela Merkel [...]

With Europe’s politicians continuing to stumble from one summit to another without a realistic plan for resolving the sovereign debt crisis, the one European institution that is keeping the entire system afloat is the European Central Bank.  The ECB gave the capital markets a boost earlier this month when it announced that it would provide [...]

In the new 2011 edition of his magnum opus Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor Dethroned, Australian economics professor Steve Keen comes out guns blazing, blasting the “Panglossian view” of neoclassical economics that did so much to get us into the credit boom and bust that we are still struggling to recover from. Keen, unlike most [...]

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi offered to resign on Tuesday, and world markets rallied.  Stocks, commodities, and the embattled euro all enjoyed healthy gains.  With that rascally charlatan out of the way, Italy could get finally serious about its economic reforms and the rest of Europe could get serious about resolving the sovereign debt crisis. [...]

If the economy slowed last quarter, it appears that Visa (NYSE: $V) cardholders didn’t get the message. The company announced earnings Wednesday for the quarter ended September 30.  Profits were up 14 percent and earnings per share—boosted by share buybacks—were up 20 percent.  Not bad numbers for a company at the mercy of disgruntled consumers.  [...]

I’ve been steadfast throughout the last two months of volatility that we are not on the verge of another 2008-caliber meltdown. The conditions simply are not there this time. Our banking sector, though still impaired with legacy mortgage securities, is not facing a liquidity crisis. You could argue—as I have (see link)—that our banking system [...]

With so much to report in the United States and Europe these days, I’ve been almost remiss in covering the ongoing China bubble. With “quantitative easing” all the buzz these days on American shores, China has actually been forced to raise rates in an attempt to cool an economy that the government believes to be [...]