“I’m not one of those religious believers in gold,” says Matthew Bishop, “but I guess I’ve become a bit of an agnostic/atheist about my faith in government-backed money, so I really think governments are in a position where they’re going to debase in a big way.”
Mr. Bishop is New York bureau chief of
The Economist… and he’s penned a book called
In Gold We Trust?: The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty. He has put us in a difficult position as we aim to stake out
“fat tail” ideas.
We likewise have no faith in government-backed money. And we’re agnostic about gold, for that matter. “Just because you understand monetary policy, the Fed and the dangers of fiat currency,” Addison said by IM between meetings this morning, “doesn’t mean you’re necessarily a gold bug.”
In any event, Mr. Bishop is onto something. “People have lost faith in the 20th-century religion of government-backed fiat money,” Mr. Bishop tells
The Wall Street Journal’s video unit, “and they’re saying at the moment, ‘We don’t trust governments with our money.’”
To wit: The blogosphere is buzzing this morning with word that the national debt under President Obama has grown by $5,027,761,476,484.56.
That’s now more than George W. Bush racked up in two terms.
Early in Bush’s second term, we were already concerned enough that Addison and Bill Bonner teamed up to write
Empire of Debt. Then Addison devoted 2½ years to turn it into
a film… before the current occupant of the White House was even part of the national conversation.
Then, few were alarmed that Bush racked up a debt total nearly equal to all his predecessors combined. Now, however, it appears the outrage threshold’s been reached.
http://5minforecast.agorafinancial.com/fading-faith-in-fiat/
If you plug the word “Canada” and then “housing” into Google, the first auto-fill suggestion that comes up is “bubble.” Before “market.” Before “price.”
“Canadians hold more than twice as much real estate as Americans and, once mortgages are factored in, have almost four times as much remaining equity in their real estate,” the Globe and Mail story goes on.
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models on the road than other model. That shouldn't come as a surprise since
the Ford F-Series truck has been the best-selling vehicle in the U.S. for 30
straight years. According to Experian Automotive, here the top 4 brands of
vehicles in operation in the U.S.: 
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-10.13(-0.73%)
Credit card lenders issued 1.1 million new cards to subprime borrowers last month — up 12.3% from a year ago, according to the credit-reporting outfit Equifax.
