Investment Watch Blog

via @TaviCosta: All previous declines from cyclical highs led to recessions. Confidence leads the way. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.   via @Not_Jim_Cramer: ISM New Orders – Inventory Spread leads the overall Composite by 3 to 6 months and currently suggests this slowdown will be the worst since 2008.   via @crescatkevin: The fire hose … Read more

Home Depot co-founders Bernie Marcus and Ken Langone on the challenges they faced getting the retailer off the ground to become the success it is today and the potential pitfalls of socialism. Billionaire Bernie Marcus Opens a New Window. has already given more than $2 billion to upwards of 300 organizations, and he said he … Read more

Wolf Richter wolfstreet.com, http://www.amazon.com/author/wolfrichter OK, so we have a phenomenon here that has taken on historically huge proportions in the era of the Everything Bubble (12 minutes):    

via Zerohedge: Every six month or so, the Bank of International Settlements, also known as the central banks’ central bank, publishes some dire warning about the increasingly precarious state of the global financial system – largely as a result of an unprecedented monetary experiment that is now pushing on a string – and every six … Read more

He’s right on corporate debt. Crazy sh*t going on for year after year.   h/t SpontaneousDisorder

Wolf Richter wolfstreet.com, http://www.amazon.com/author/wolfrichter More cars and trucks on the road in the US than ever. But usage drops. Saturation everywhere. On the surface, we see this: Total miles driven in April on all roads and streets in the US rose by 2.5%, or by 6.8 billion miles, compared to a year earlier, to 279.3 … Read more

by Charles Hugh-Smith Here is the moral decay of America’s ruling elites boiled down to a single word. There are many reasons why Imperial Rome declined, but two primary causes that get relatively little attention are moral decay and soaring wealth inequality. The two are of course intimately connected: once the morals of the ruling Elites … Read more

via Zerohedge: A new study has provided evidence linking unaffordable housing in Vancouver to foreign ownership, Chinese capital and millionaire migrants, according to the SCMP. A white paper published by Josh Gordon, an assistant professor at Simon Fraser University’s school of public policy, found a stunning 96% correlation between metro Vancouver municipalities’ price to income ratios and the proportion … Read more

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bku8qhmPFM4

In 2007 a handful of people started to wake up. They realized that taking something out of thin air, assigning it the highest rating possible, and then leveraging it to the maximum was a bad idea. Well after the Financial Crisis, we were told that everything had been fixed and that measures were put into … Read more

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7HczbbamGI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQxfnmYmmz0

by DCG Fun fact about this demorat governor: “He is a private business owner based in Chicago and a managing partner and co-founder of the Pritzker Group and a member of the Pritzker family who own the Hyatt hotel chain; he has an estimated personal net worth of $3.2 billion. Pritzker was the Democratic nominee for governor … Read more

By Nick Cunningham Canada is desperately trying to build the much-delayed Trans Mountain Expansion, but even as it tries to advance the ball on one front, another pipeline has found itself in the crosshairs. Enbridge’s Line 5 pipeline carries more than a half a million barrels of oil and products per day from Alberta, across … Read more