John Rubino

Articles by John Rubino

If you’re running a business and the price of one thing goes up, you can work around it by economizing elsewhere. But when everything – wages, rent, supplies, taxes – goes up simultaneously, you have a problem that can be solved one of...
Back in 2005 a reporter took a tour of General Motors’ headquarters, and in the resulting article one thing stood out: The executives and engineers the reporter interviewed were only modestly enthused about their sedans and sub-compacts....
Big companies report blow-out earnings. Home prices soar. North Korea promises to end its nuke program, possibly averting another Asian war.

And stocks fall.

Does this mean the news no longer matters? That’s exactly what it means....
Cornflakes and milk may or may not be getting more expensive, but some higher-profile things are rocking like it’s 1979. Houses, for example:

Home prices just took the biggest jump in four years

(CNBC) – Homebuyers, hold onto your...
“War” and “pensions” are conceptually about as different as it’s possible to be. But – in a measure of how far into Crazy Town we’ve wandered – they’re both taking the world in the same direction.

If a Middle East (or Asian!) war doesn’...
Real estate tends to ride an emotional rollercoaster, as anyone who made it through the 2000s can attest. But in some ways the current market is even stranger than those of past cycles. Consider:

Home buying market so brutal, some home...
Financial crises tend to start at the periphery and work their way into a system’s core. Think subprime mortgages (a tiny little niche of a few hundred billion dollars) that blew up in 2007 and nearly brought the curtain down on the whole...
Back in the 1990s, critics of the dot-com bubble used to point out that the global economy depended on the US stock market and the US stock market depended on, like, ten Internet stocks with negative aggregate earnings. The resulting...
Friday’s commitment of traders (COT) report for gold and silver offered more of the same. Which is to say the gold futures action was boring and the silver action was strange and exciting.

Starting with gold, the large speculators – who...
So many patterns that have held for decades seem to have broken down, leading to one of two conclusions: Either this time really is different in ways that appear to violate what used to be seen as iron-clad laws of finance, or those laws...

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