New Armstrong Essay

Fantastic.  A must read!  Link

Deficit, Debt, Interest Rates, and Inflation

Here is a post I've cobbled together from a wide variety of sources about the relationship between the federal deficit, debt, interest rates, and inflation...

Headlines

Big Congrats to the new head of the IMF!  Good luck:

Debt-laden Greece finds no buyers in 'fire sale' of national assets (Guardian UK)
Report Predicts Chaos If U.S. Prioritizes Payments (newsmax.com)
Moody's warns over Spanish regional debt (expatica.com)
Berlusconi ally warns of government fall over austerity (reuters)
Portugal Deficit Much Higher Than Forecast (wsj)
Chile May Hold Back on Bond Sale Amid European Debt Crisis (Bloomberg)
European June Economic Confidence Declines to Its Lowest in Eight Months (Bloomberg)

Weekly U.S. unemployment numbers released and the Reuters article has attempts by apparent experts trying to come up with something cogent.

Also stories about Florida, Connecticut, and lots of stories about the California Budget (oh, and Stockton's credit rating has been reduced)

Finally, the South Carolina Budget Crisis May Force State To Cancel Republican Primary.  I don't even know where to begin with that one.

UBS Central Banker Survey re. $ as default reserve currency

The U.S. dollar is poised to lose its status as the global reserve currency during the next 25 years, according to a UBS survey of central bank reserve managers.

“Right now there is great concern out there around the financial trajectory that the US is on,” said Larry Hatheway, chief economist at UBS, told the Financial Times, because the dollar has dropped 5 percent so far this year, and is trading close to its lowest ever level against a basket of the world’s major currencies.

From this place, but it's all over the place

Silver shortage?

Post today from Jesse's Cafe Americain has doomsday scenario about physical silver shortage.  Good technical charts on Gold, Silver, and the Dollar.

Economagic

Added a new section to the right for metric portals.  Economagic is ridiculous.  Mouse over links for the chart; click links for the data.

Case-Shiller April Numbers

link to post from Seeking Alpha, image from Blytic.

Basically, prices are (kinda) going up, but year-over-year declines. (click image to enlarge)

the original Shiller 100 year chart:

China / Europe

China to Bail out Insolvent European Currencies via Zero Hedge (found @ Martenson's blog)

DANG!  Hard Core article about August, 2011 financial crisis from the Global Europe Anticipation Bulletin:

In this issue, we discuss the two most dangerous aspects of the Autumn 2011 shock, namely: . the detonating mechanism of European government debt . the explosion process of the US bomb in terms of government debts  

At the same time, in the context of the acceleration of the rebalancing of global power relationships, we introduce the anticipation of a fundamental geopolitical process for the holding of a Euro-BRICS summit by 2014.  

Finally, we focus our recommendations on the means of avoiding being part of the 15 trillion USD in ghost assets that will go up in smoke in the coming months, with a special mention for developments in real estate in Europe whose collapse we used to anticipate for 2015 will start in fact as early as 2012. 

So it's easy to put 2 and 2 together and assume that come 2012, China (with it's 2011 pullout of US debt), will start its European takeover.  Good times.

Ben Graham

Graham Investor's review of the 10 Golden Rules of investing through current lens. Always good to go back to the basics.

New Armstrong Essay

Armstrong Economics: Presidential Elections: 2016 the Year from Hell? (Martin Armstrong, 06/25/11)

Political Instability's affect on markets. As always, full of typos and interesting ideas


some key pullouts: 

Welcome

Portal / Blog about Macroeconomic trends and financial markets. This is basically for me, but if you want to use this information, go for it!