An entrepreneur's business cycle theory - Conscience of an Entrepreneur

...what causes the business cycle, and especially the more pronounced "booms and busts". All the schools of monetary theory have their explanations. The Keynesians see the market economy as fundamentally unstable and in need of constant intervention, the Modern Monetary Theorists seem to think a bust is an unavoidable consequence of a prolonged imbalance of payments between the private and the public sector and the Austrians have a complex hypothesis about artificially low interest rates fooling entrepreneurs to "malinvest" in stages of production that are too far removed from the consumer...


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Jim Rogers Doesn’t Believe in Goldman Conspiracy Theories

What Buffett Didn't Tell You - The Motley Fool

Last Thursday, Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK-B ) Chairman Warren Buffett published "Why stocks beat gold and bonds," an adapted excerpt from his upcoming shareholder letter. There is little to disagree with in the letter, but Buffett's exposition is a bit misleading, or at the very least, incomplete because he isn't explicit enough in spelling out his assumptions. Investors who follow his advice blindly, without understanding those assumptions, could achieve a very different result from the one Buffett describes.

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Is Greece Irrelevant to Global Markets?

Rogers: I Would Not Buy Facebook

Transcript

Will the Government Put Money Market Funds Out of Business? -Megan McArdle

Exert:

At last, the government is proposing new rules, which are supposed to make MMFs less risky.  The funds would have to raise new capital, and some minor withdrawal limitations would be imposed on customers.  They would also have to offer a floating net asset value instead of the current "guarantee" that if you deposit a dollar, you'll always get at least that dollar back.

The last is all by itself disastrous for these funds, whose main attraction is that they act like bank accounts.  As for the rest, in a normal interest rate environment, this would be onerous.  But with interest rates as low as they are, there's no way for MMFs to absorb the hit by offering a lower return; it looks to me as if the interest rate would probably have to be negative.  Which is to say, your MMF would actually be charging you for the privilege of giving you their money.

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Why argue about roads, when I can own them.

I started thinking, why spend time trying to convince people that the private sector can build and manage roads?  Why not just own roads myself and collect a dividend? There are many publicly traded road companies.  Anyone with a stock brokerage account can be a road owner. So I decided to risk it, and invest a small amount in Road King Infrastructure and Abertis Infraestructuras. I did this partly as a vanity investment and bragging rights.   Now when someone claims that private sector could never fund or manage roads, I can brag about how I am a road owner and collecting a fat dividend, so I am a walking contradiction of that claim. However vanity investing does not always pay off. The two I bought have paid fat dividends in the past, but dividends can disappear, and I could lose a significant amount of my principle as well. The road stocks are higher risk stocks and not for everyone, so if you are thinking the same way as me do your homework before investing.

Here are two articles on publicly traded road companies to start your research:

For Whom the Road Tolls: Reviewing Listed Toll Roads, Bridges and Tunnels  

Another Approach to China: Toll Road Stocks

Disclosure: This is not intended as investment advice.   In other words don't blame me for losing your shirt in road stocks. Also I own Road King Infrastructure and Abertis Infraestructuras at the time of this post.

Marc Faber: Relax, Stocks Will Not Collapse

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Stocks Too Expensive? Not In Europe

With the Standard & Poor's 500 Index off to its best January in 15 years, it's getting tougher to find cheap stocks in the United States. But it's not much of a problem in Europe.

Sovereign default worries have made the region's shares the cheapest they've been to American investors since 2004. 

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Europe's "Great Deleveraging" Has Only Just Begun (Zero Hedge)

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States seek currencies made of silver and gold

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- A growing number of states are seeking shiny new currencies made of silver and gold.
Worried that the Federal Reserve and the U.S. dollar are on the brink of collapse, lawmakers from 13 states, including Minnesota, Tennessee, Iowa, South Carolina and Georgia, are seeking approval from their state governments to either issue their own alternative currency or explore it as an option


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