Worldview Investing - Ruminations on the World Economy

  Credit: AP     Student marchers across France are ostensibly protesting against decaying and understaffed schools. However, schools are just one of the nation's great problems that have been left to metastasize for more than twenty years due to incompetent governance.  As with all western countries, those who get elected to French public office get there by promising more government benefits to voters. No-one wins an election promising austerity or a balanced budget. And so the nation's fiscal crisis continues to expand.     France is currently deemed to be the "Sick Man" of the EU.  Its government debt to GDP is near 120%. The cost of "servicing" that debt (paying interest on its government bonds) is expected to increase nearly 60% by 2030, just four years from now. Its 10-year  borrowing costs are rapidly rising - now over 5%, the highest in over twenty years. It has nearly $1 trillion of debt coming due in the next four years and must sell $3...

                                                   Credit: Gemini                                                                                            " Gaslighting ":   v. misleading others to advance one's own interests .   We  are constantly being gaslighted by those who want us to act in a certain way, buy a product, vote for them or accept something as true that is either misleading or utterly false . This comes at us on a daily basis through advertising, the main stream media, political commentary, and countless social media sites. We focus here on the gaslighting being do...

  Credit: Gemini     Our posts have regularly warned that worldwide government fiscal profligacy will lead to severe financial risks for workers, savers, investors and retirees and could trigger serious social unrest. These and other risks, including military, continue to multiply in number and expand in scope. Recent events should have caused the klaxons to sound loudly but the political and media worlds have worked diligently to silence them - to your detriment.      Where to start? A notable bit of news is that the US government has now amassed $40 trillion in debt ($30T owed to "the public", meaning banks, insurers, investors, pension funds, foreign governments and investors and another $10 trillion of "inter-governmental" debt owed to US government agencies including the Social Security and Medicare funds, and government pension programs). This debt has risen an astonishing $17 trillion in last six and a half years. It took the US government 192 years...

The Declaration of Independence -  by John Trumbull, 1819 A Humble Beginning     Following several failed attempts, the first permanent English settlers arrived on the northeast bank of the James River  in 1607. The site was then known as James Fort and is now known as Jamestown, Virginia.  The motivations for these people to give up their homes, jobs, neighbors, and comforts to eke out an existence in an unknown, undeveloped, foreign land were many, including: the promise of vast cheap land, economic opportunity, religious and political freedoms.         Only 60 of the 214 settlers survived the bitter winter of  1609-1610, known as the "Starving Time". But by 1612 West Indies tobacco was being successfully grown, leading to an economic boom for the colony. That location served for the first of many legislative assemblies in the "New World" - new to the settlers but well known to the indigenous Paspahegh people. Over the following ...