The sky is falling! The sky is falling! Buy, buy, buy.
I am looking at the doom and gloom in the marketplace and I think about how in some cases people overreact to bad news. I am going to stay away from the stupid pricing in mortgage bonds and focus on Vale, a.k.a. CVRD. Vale owns [...]
Okay, everyone is coming out with solutions, and I do not like most of them. Let me go over a simple solution. We have to fix two things: Freddie and Fannie, and the existing toxic debt. I have a simple solution to both things in one deal.
We create 10 regional banks that are 100% owned [...]
Valuations are traditionally done in boom times and bust times, and they are done very differently in both times. I am going to go over how to value a mineral property in a full market cycle. I am not going to focus on any one project, but I will draw conclusions that can be applied [...]
The Herald Sun: Whole new ball game
A key note to the Guinea government: Next time you want to nationalize something, wait for the rail line to be built. I mean seriously, if you are going to take Rio Tinto, do it right. Get them to invest at least 1-2 billion in capital and get some [...]
Does government have a place in business? This is a question that I have been debating for awhile. Orderly markets require regulation, and regulation has to come from government. Too much regulation and you end up messed, too little and you end up fried. This is sort of like cooking a frog.
Now government has to [...]
Chicken Little, the sky is falling. Did you not notice the sky is falling? I mean, everyone knows the sky is falling. Do you not watch TV, read a newspaper, own a house, have a mortgage? Do you not know that the sky is falling is the flavor of the day?
Do not worry. Next we [...]
Drill, drill, drill.
Sounds so simple, right? If you drill, you end up with oil. And if you end up with more oil, you will drop the price, right? The reason to drill has to do more with what people think than reality. What I mean by that is the drilling will cause people to think [...]
Without ground rules to play with in the financial markets, people will make stupid bets for short-term profit that cost everyone 100 times over in the long term. The U.S. had–I stress had–the best mortgage system in the world: 30-year fixed paper at a decent rate, with 20% down. This was a bet that created [...]
