Marc Faber makes some salient points to Yahoo! tech-ticker on where he feels the markets and world economy are going and he strongly disagrees with Ken Fisher about the USA having ‘too little debt’. He is strongly anti-cash and feels that commodities and stocks (despite what many believe is simply a bear market rally) are the place to be for the next 2-3 years. An interesting point made on tech-ticker was that the world economy doesn’t need as many people any more, it makes for compelling reading.
Oil at $20?
(podcast here)
Verleger talks about oil falling to c. $20 which may seem outlandish at the moment but the reality is that oil will likely take a fall in the short term, even with OPEC’s efforts to direct the market it won’t change the outcome, if oil is not being bought fast enough then it means that it will have to go into storage, the real story in this for me is one of oil storage and there are only a limited number of places you can store oil, you can leave it in the ground (not likely), you can store it in large land based tanks (these are getting very full) and then there are Ships, and that is a key, oil shipping is probably going to see a lift in business.
There is too much supply for existing demand and in the same way that the end of subsidies along with financial meltdown brought prices down from $147 the ongoing existence of these factors means that we won’t see a short term run up …
Jim Rogers, David Frost interview
Jim Rogers talks to Sir David Frost about the role of Government and Central Banks in the current crisis, he believes that the ethos of ‘not letting anybody fail’ actually magnifies problems because doing this means the bubble continues to inflate far beyond the size it would have done otherwise.
Jim has a very simple and straightforward way of explaining things that make him ever popular, although some of the medicine he prescribes is considered quite harsh. His point about letting the market do what it must is of the libertarian strain and for all anybody knows, he may be right (right as in ‘correct’ not as in ‘wing’), if so then everything being done to counteract the crisis is the inverse of what we should be doing.
Expect more inflation as Oil Reaches $100
Inflation… commodities bull run is not finished by a long shot! the upsurge in prices of the basic things that we all need is going to cause base level inflation to rise, the kind that could upset China and India’s growth as the things they manufacture become more expensive to make, however the market doesn’t embrace increased end user prices as the are suffering already from the same inflation.
For Oil to hit $100 a barrel is something that people used to joke about, today its real. There is upset in too many of the worlds oil producing regions. Nigeria has some of the best oil but they also have some of the best examples of abuse in human rights (read the story of Ken Siro Wiwa) and there are rebels out there fighting agains the way oil profits are distributed they are called ‘MEND’ or Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta.
Here is something to think about, not a consipracy theory so much as a novel observation: What if it serves the Oil companies to have such …