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Ron Paul Gets No Respect

I get more hits on my site for the term “Ron Paul” than any other by 5X.  Strange for a financial website – maybe not since money and politics are so interrelated.  If you don’t believe me just look at the amount of wealth that was destroyed by the “bone-headed” move the Canadian government made in November.  By imposing a new tax on income trusts billions of dollars vanished in thin air.

Ron Paul is definitely the Rodney Dangerfield of this upcoming election.  He gets absolutely no respect.  I was cracking up after I think the second Republican debate.  The FOX commentators couldn’t believe that he was winning their Internet polls.  They attributed it to the Internet savvy crowd stuffing the ballots.  Well how do they explain this?  In the second quarter, Ron Paul is reporting that he has 2.4 million cash on hand.  That is more money than former “front-runner” John McCain.

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DOW 13000 – Whoo Hooo!

In spite of all of the big hoopla, the DOW simply isn’t what it used to be.

Source:  Peter Schiff

Despite its recent eclipse of 13,000 the Dow now buys 30% fewer euros than it did then back in 2000 when it was priced at approximately 11,500. It also buys 35% fewer gallons of milk, 40% fewer bushels of corn or wheat, 65% fewer ounces of silver, 70% fewer barrels of oil, 80% fewer pounds of copper, and 90% fewer pounds of uranium. Try figuring what the Dow will buy in terms of other necessities, such as housing, insurance, college tuition or hospitalization. Any way you measure it, the Dow is worth far less today then it was in January of 2000.

The point to remember is that when it comes to records, it is real purchasing power, not nominal value, that counts. Measured by its purchasing power, the Dow has clearly lost value over the past seven years. Those who have remained invested in Dow stocks during that time period are clearly poorer as a result. Those who continue doing so will likely loss even more wealth in the years ahead, regardless of how many more nominal record highs the Dow sets.

More …

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Gasoline at $4 Coming to a Pump Near You, Unfazed by Rising Tab

I paid 55 bucks to fill up my car this weekend.  That’s only going to cover 3/4 of a tank soon.  Looks like it is time to bulk up on Oil Company stocks.  That will more than cover the increased gas expenses.

April 23 (Bloomberg) — Whether it’s $50 to fill up your Prius or $130 for the Ford Expedition, $4-a-gallon gasoline is coming to a pump near you.

Fuel prices are rising at a pace not seen since Hurricanes Katrina and Rita knocked out a third of the U.S. oil refining industry in 2005. Gasoline consumption is climbing twice as fast as last year and will accelerate when summer travel begins late next month.

“What we’re surprised by is the increased demand,” said James Mulva, chief executive officer at ConocoPhillips, whose refineries from California to New Jersey produce 56 million gallons of gas a day, enough to meet 14 percent of the country’s needs. “Even though the price of gasoline is up, the demand is up,” he said in an April 12 interview in Houston.

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The Federal Reserve Monopoly over Money

Source: Ron Paul’s Texas Straight Talk
April 9, 2007

Recently I had the opportunity to question Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke when he appeared before the congressional Joint Economic committee. The topic that morning was the state of the American economy, and many of my colleagues raised questions about how the Fed might better “regulate” things to ease fears of an economic downturn. The tenor of my colleagues’ questions suggested that Mr. Bernanke’s job is nothing less than to run the U.S. economy, like some kind of Soviet central planner. Continue reading “The Federal Reserve Monopoly over Money”

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Subprime Mortgage Problem Contained? Give Me a Break!

I think that some heads are going to roll when Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson are forced to admit that the subprime mortgage problem is not contained.  In my previous professional life, I worked as a sales person for a software company.  We as sales people were often referred to as “feet on the street.”  In addition to our sales responsibilities, we were responsible for gathering competitive information, surveying the landscape, detecting trends and most importantly feeding this data back to headquarters.  Through formal as well as informal channels, the “feet on the street” ensured that the executives always had the most current field data. Since the executives were constantly speaking to Wall Street or in Industry forums inaccurate data could be very costly in many ways. Continue reading “Subprime Mortgage Problem Contained? Give Me a Break!”