Economic Overviews

Janet Yellen and her merry band of money printers are oblivious to the dangerous speculation and valuation excesses that their policies have implanted throughout the financial system. No wonder the Trump voters want to throw the bums out. It is none too soon.

We desperately need to repair and replace a vast part of our national infrastructure but where do we get the money? Well, the U.S. has spent hundreds of billions of dollars trying to fix Iraq and Afghanistan and God knows how many more hundreds of billions of dollars over the years on other projects around the world so what if we renewed the focus on our own needs?. [In this article I identify our infrastructure shortfalls and present a way to pay for the needed projects which, combined with my proposed specific massive tax reform, could reposition the country to be the most powerfully competitive nation in the world.

Monitoring how Beijing is managing China's slowdown, and whether it will be able to rebalance its growth, are highly important as weakness in China will weigh on U.S. stocks. Given the ongoing structural reforms, government policies and global economic conditions, certain sectors within China have surfaced as winners while some are surprisingly becoming losers, which provide long-term investing opportunities. This article identifies the sectors that are winning, losing and remaining neutral.

Economic expert and best-selling author, David Stockman, offers a dire view of the deep financial trouble America faces in his new book titled “Trumped!” in which he is quoted as saying "The rubes are revolting, and they are revolting because they can see the system is rigged. These people are fed up, and they have had enough, and I think this is where Trump is coming from. I think we are at an inflection point where someone is finally challenging the Wall Street/Washington elites. Trump is kind of a wild man in some ways, but he hasn’t spent the last 30 years in Washington drinking the Kool-Aid."

Donald Trump is promising change, and many of his proposals sound good (and, yes, there are also some areas to be concerned about), but Trump's plan stops well short of the fundamental overhaul of our economic and financial systems that is required. That being said, what he is proposing is vastly superior to Hillary Clinton’s plan so he should definitely be applauded for at least moving in the right direction. Below are some of his economic proposals "to save the U.S. economy."

Trying to gauge where the economy is headed is almost always a waste of time. Instead, focus on the emotion and trend (price action); the trend is always your friend.

In a long-term strategy which employs both investments, there is a case for putting an over-weight on housing, and an under-weight on gold, given current relative price levels unless one is specifically investing for financial crisis.

With the Olympic Games underway, many eyes are on Rio...[and, as such,] investors...are...directing more attention to Brazil. While its stock market has had one of the world's best performances to date this year with the MSCI Brazil 25/50 Index up more than 50%...[and] the MSCI Brazil Small Cap Index...[up] over 60%, the question now is, can the rally continue? My take is that it could potentially, but investors need to be willing to accept significant risk. [Let me explain.]

According to the New York Federal Reserve, 14% of the U.S. population lives in households that have “negative” wealth. In other words, these are households that have more debts piled up than assets, which puts their net worth in minus territory. In today’s chart, we compare the data on negative wealth households with the data on their positive counterparts. There are some obvious and stark contrasts.

Italy has overtaken Spain to become the weakest link among the Eurozone’s largest economies, with a banking sector desperately in need of a bailout and, if Italy’s banking crisis is a rerun of Spain’s, we can certainly expect some troubles in the Eurozone and, consequently, for the Euro.