Investor CAFÉ Newsletters
Is Wall Street Just another Las Vegas?
“Wall Street is a gambling house peopled with dealers, croupiers and touts on one side, and with winners and suckers on the other.” –Nicholas Darvas, “Wall Street: The Other Las Vegas” I am in Las Vegas for FreedomFest, “the world’s largest gathering of free minds.” Among our hundred-plus speakers and several thousand attendees are wealthy […]
What Advice Would Benjamin Franklin Give America on Independence Day?
Today’s Skousen CAFÉ is an Independence Day version of a previous write-up from January 2013 that warned about the threat of inflation at the time of Ben Franklin’s 307th birthday. What would this founding father extraordinaire, the first scientific American and financial guru say about America on the eve of Independence Day 2014? As a […]
The Two Most Common Words in American Culture Today
Austrian economists talk a lot about “time preference,” the willingness for people to wait before they are paid income, capital gains, interest or dividends. Whether you are a student, business person, investor or consumer, waiting is a fact of life — it takes time to earn a degree, make money in a business, take profits […]
The Most Dangerous Investment Strategy
“If we are in a transition period, the person in the most danger is the one who has recently done well, because he’s done well on things that are about to change.” — Dean LeBaron (Batterymarch Financial Management) Last Friday, the Wall Street Journal had a cover story, “Big Investors Lose Even as Market Rises,” […]
Europe Cuts Rates to Below Zero, Good or Bad?
The European Central Bank, under Italian banker Mario Draghi, cut its bank deposit rate below zero in an effort to “avert the dangerous threat of deflation” and to spur the “sluggish” euro-zone economy. European monetary policy gradually has shifted toward more and more inflation. It started off with a hard-core resistance to inflation under a […]
Business Leader Will Offer Real Solutions to Healthcare, Poverty and Unemployment at FreedomFest
“Big business is the only free, non-revolutionary social organization.” — Peter Drucker Harris Rosen, CEO and founder of Rosen Resorts & Hotels in Central Florida, is a visionary who has proven that the private sector can solve today’s big social problems, such as unemployment, illness and poverty. Government often just gets into the way, and […]
Are there Bargains in Global Stocks?
“Narendra Modi’s amazing victory gives India its best chance ever of prosperity.” —The Economist I took an extensive tour last April through Asia, visiting Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan. I noticed that while their economies were booming, their stock markets have been lackluster since the Great Recession of 2008. Only Thailand has […]
Why My Favorite ‘Private Equity’ Sector is under Selling Pressure
I’ve been recommending a small sector of private equity called business development companies (BDCs) for many years. These are small-time lenders and specialty-finance companies such as Ares Capital, Apollo Investment Group, Prospect Capital and Main Street Capital that finance small- and middle-size private companies that want to expand. They get paid interest and fees on […]
Marx Madness Is Back
“Capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine democratic societies.” –Thomas Piketty, “Capital in the 21st Century” (2014) The Economist magazine rightly calls French professor Thomas Piketty the new Marx, although a watered-down version. Piketty’s bestseller (rated #1 on Amazon) is a thick volume with the same title as Karl Marx’s 1867 magnum […]
The Gathering Storm in Global Warming: Should We Be Afraid?
“U.S. climate has already changed, study finds, citing heat and floods.” — New York Times headline, May 7, 2014 Is it really getting hotter and should we be worried? “Global warming” is being blamed for every conceivable natural disaster, whether it involves severe cold in the Northeast this past winter or flooding in Miami. The New York Times has […]
