Perspectives

Speculators who treat the stock market as a casino love concepts. They are new, unburdened by history, can be projected far into the future, and thus can justify almost any stock price. For those who foist stock ideas on an unsuspecting public, it is a rich vein to...

Sometime in the next 15-45 days, the United States government is going to run out of credit. This is the result of a law, passed in 1917, that placed a limit on what the country can borrow as described by law. The United States is the only developed country in the...

Many index investors, after the drubbing taken in 2022, have looked at their statements for the first quarter of 2023 with some relief. The Standard and Poor’s 500 Index is up seven percent this quarter. However, the average stock is up less than one percent. This...

The closing of three financial institutions in the past week has sent a sense of crisis through the financial world. Deposits are insured at FDIC institutions up to $250,000. Some accounts are many times this number. Venture capitalists (VCs) typically deposit in the...

It should be obvious by now to everyone that increasing interest rates to slow the economy is not resulting in lower inflation. It is obvious to the Federal Reserve, who nevertheless continues to increase rates to kill the patient to make the procedure successful. The...

As of last Thursday, the United States Government reached the limit of its authority to borrow. While some evasive actions are being initiated by the Treasury Department to keep the government open and pay its obligations, these steps are expected to be exhausted...

Asheville, North Carolina holds a special place for the writer and native son Thomas Wolfe, whose 1940 novel’s title You Can’t Go Home Again is a fitting framing for investing in 2023. Many investors are trying to treat the events of 2022 as an aberration in...

The current bankruptcy of bitcoin exchange FTX is sending shockwaves throughout the bitcoin industry. Billions of dollars of bitcoin investments cannot be accounted for. Celebrities like Tom Brady and Matt Damon have been exposed as paid hacks who sold their...

With the sale of Twitter to Elon Musk last week, a syndicate of banks had previously offered to loan Mr. Musk $13 billion to help pay for the $44 billion deal. The intentions of the banks were to turn around and sell the debt to the investing public as bonds...