The Sizemore Investment Letter

Greece is no stranger to economic crises such as the current one. The country has been in debt since its independence and has gone through a cycle of borrowing and defaulting numerous times. Foreign powers have always had an interest in maintaining Greece’s stability, so previously they always agreed to refinance its debts. The only new factor in Greece’s ongoing crisis is that the country is not as strategically important to outsiders as it was before the end of the Cold War, so foreign governments are not as interested in loaning Athens money.

With outstanding U.S. debt fast approaching 100% of GDP and budget deficits continuing to yawn stubbornly wide, the next president and congress will have some unpleasant decisions to make.  Spending will have to be cut.  But from where? Social Security and Medicare will come under debate, as will most discretionary spending.  But the elephant in [...]

World stock markets soared on Wednesday after a German court gave its blessing to the EU sovereign debt bailouts.  The Dow finished the day 275 points higher, and the standby safe havens—Treasuries and gold—fell sharply. As much as I’d like to believe that the gut-wrenching volatility that plagued us throughout the month of August is [...]

If you think that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke is unpopular, consider the tragic case of Takahashi Korekiyo, who served as Bank of Japan governor from 1911-1913 and as finance minister and prime minister in the 1920s and 1930s. Gillian Tett recounts his story in the Financial Times. In the first decades of the 20th century, [...]

Neil Howe, who previously co-wrote several groundbreaking books on demographic trends with William Strauss (Generations, The Fourth Turning, Millennials Rising), published a new book in 2008 with Richard Jackson: The Graying of the Great Powers: Demography and Geopolitics in the 21st Century. We consider Howe’s prior work with Strauss to be required reading for anyone [...]

Book Review of Fareed Zakaria’s The Post-American World Fareed Zakaria, Editor of Newsweek International and host of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, has emerged in recent years as one of America’s best minds in current events and world politics. His recent book, The Post-American World, touches on several issues near and dear to our research. The gloomy [...]

That China’s One Child Policy will eventually wreak havoc on China’s economy will come as no surprise to my readers.  I have written for years that China will find it impossible to sustain a viable domestic consumer economy when the younger generation is, due to the simple math of one child per every two parents, [...]

As a follow-up to my prior post on how demographics are affecting the calculus of international relations in the Middle East—and between Turkey and Israel in particular—I’d like to start with some comments from Mark Steyn. Steyn is a bit of a controversial shock jock—the Howard Stern of conservative commentary, if you will—so I hesitate [...]

Years ago, when I was earning my master’s degree at the London School of Economics, I had a memorable conversation with a classmate of mine from Istanbul named Deniz. Over a couple beers at the Three Tuns, Deniz explained Turkey’s two most pressing problems—the rise of political Islam and the Kurdish separatist movement—and he tied [...]

Over the past decade, the focus of the news media has been on Islamist terror organizations such as Al Qaeda, and understandably so. The September 11, 2001 attacks were the biggest acts of terror in history, and every American remembers well the site of the twin towers falling to the ground. It was a traumatic [...]