Day: March 19, 2008


Guest Editorial: Honey, I Vaporized My Customers, by John Mauldin

By now, everyone knows that the subprime crisis started with non-existent lending standards which resulted in the large numbers of foreclosures we are seeing today. Those foreclosures will be rising throughout the year. We are not near anything like the top of the rising number of foreclosures. Ben Bernanke said last July that losses from the subprime would be in the $100 billion dollar range. True confession. I think I wrote six months earlier that it would be $200 billion. I point that out to make the point that I am an optimist by nature. The latest “bidding war” number …


Letter Re: Forever Postage Stamps as an Inflation Hedge

Sir; You have written favorably of the US Postal Service Liberty Bell (“Forever”) stamps. Short history: The US Post Office Department was reorganized and became the US Postal Service effective July 1971. Employees of the Post Office then became employees of the Postal Service, but saw no changes in their paychecks. They looked the same. More recently, the Postal Service has likely accumulated significant cash from selling the “Forever” series. The government’s pledge is that the stamps will henceforth be honored as postage without supplement……no more adding one or two cent stamps’ postage (or more) to the already purchased forever …


Odds ‘n Sods:

J. Ross sent us some serious Gloom und Doom: Fed Heads Back to the Well, Will It Run Dry?    o o o Trevor flagged this piece at WND: Fed abandons dollar in new round of rate cuts–Reacts to fall of investment giant Bear Stearns, Carlyle Capital Corp.    o o o Mark recommended the rifle muzzle brakes made by OPS. We have had the muzzles of all of our .30 caliber bolt actions threaded 1/2-28. That is the same thread used on many flash hiders (such as AR-15, M4 and AR-10.) Our preferred flash hider is the Vortex Model …


Jim’s Quote of the Day:

“The first information survival skill we all need is the ability to decode propaganda and demythologize the highly commercialized and entertainment-based U.S. culture. Psychologists politely call it ‘resistance to enculturation.’ Writer Ernest Hemingway had a less elegant term: ‘cr*p detecting.’” – Karl Albrecht, article in Training and Development magazine, February 2001.