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Europe is rapidly approaching the denouement, the Endgame, of its currency experiment. The outcome is not clear, at least to your humble analyst, as the debates rage and there are huge pluses and minuses the 17 nations must decide upon. But the proverbial road down which the can is tumbling and clattering...
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Today I offer something a little different from normal economic fare. As I keep saying, I think it is important that as business people and entrepreneurs we look for ways to increase our business while others are pulling back. While innovation can mean new technologies (and their costs!), in my experience...
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This week's Outside the Box will be unusual. Rather than one essay, I give you a number of short ones, and links that are representative of the confusion that is Europe, along with a little history. As I noted this weekend, last week's Eurozone announcement was short of details, and very little...
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Do we need a law that makes it illegal to push a moose out of a moving aircraft? In baseball, what are the odds of a perfect game? How difficult will it be to solve the problems of the Eurozone? These and other issues are meditated upon by Grant Williams in his Things That Make You Go Hmmm… letter...
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This week we take in a piece that is somewhat outside my own box. There are a number of people who feel strongly that the US (and world governments in general) cannot pull out of the downward spiral they are in, that monetary policy is fixed on printing ever more money, and that the problems of fiat...
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I love Grant Williams and his writing in his letter Things That Make You Go Hmmm... And this week's Outside the Box is the first section from his recent post, where he starts with a brief history of Gadhafi and ends up giving us a tutorial on oil pricing. This may be "inside baseball" ...
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This week your Outside the Box offers two views, one from the US and one from Europe, both dealing with banks and financing. First, back in July, my friend Chris Whalen at Institutional Risk Analytics wrote an important comment about how the situation in the housing market is blocking efforts by the...
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This week’s Outside the Box is from my good friend John Silvia, the Chief Economist at Wells Fargo and fishing buddy in Maine. He has written a powerhouse book called Dynamic Economic Decision Making: Strategies for Financial Risk, Capital Markets, and Monetary Policy. Combining three intellectual...
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This week's Outside the Box is in the tradition of showing the other side of the argument. Normally, anything George Soros says or does politically has my blood pressure up about 20 points. Yet, I posted another piece of his today in Over My Shoulder – and then ran across this longer piece...
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For today's special-edition OTB, let's turn our fiscal eye across the pond to all that's going haywire in Europe. But not the continent's banking crisis, per se. Today's piece takes a broad look at who's really running the show. I'll give you a hint: they've done it before...
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Long-time readers are familiar with the wisdom of Lacy Hunt. He is a regular feature of Outside the Box. He writes a quarterly piece for Hoisington Asset Management in Austin, and this is one of his better ones. Read it twice. “While the massive budget deficits and the buildup of federal debt,...
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The saying goes that you can learn something new every day. If you're paying attention that is - and more importantly if you know where to look. Today I was getting my morning fill of geopolitical intel from my friends over at STRATFOR (on everything from personal security to country economic profiles...
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This week’s Outside the Box is from one of the more interesting thinkers and observers of the markets I know, Simon Hunt. When we get together in London, conversations are lively, as we don’t always see eye to eye; but we can always discuss, in a very civil manner, the affairs of the world...
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Today we turn away from Europe and QE2 and talk about something I find far more interesting, if not as immediate. I have been talking and emailing with Pat Cox of Breakthrough Technology Alerts a lot lately. There is just so much happening in the biotech space and, as long-time readers know, that is...
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This will be one of the more controversial Outside the Box posts in a great long time. Indeed, I debated with myself at some length. It will make some readers mad, but I decided it is more important to make most readers think. And, as it happens, there are parts of this week’s essay that I rather...