June Gloom
If your weather hasn’t cast a pall over June as it has here in the Pacific Northwest, the news and the economy surely have. The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico highlights governmental incompetence, the G20 lacks unified economic policy, some place called Kyrgyzstan is a complete basket case, and currencies and markets gyrate wildly. Good riddance, June.
Digging deeper, the back-burner news did everything to deepen the impression of an incompetent, out of touch government…
EPA focuses on … the Amish
As the Gulf Coast faces an existential threat, you might think the EPA has better things to do than pick on the Amish – but you’d be wrong. Apparently, those filthy Amish polluters got caught red handed! Yes, it seems they are polluting the environment by dumping waste into rivers. A bunch of manure, indeed.
Russian Spy Captured, then Lost
The whole Russian “spy” situation is a little bit ridiculous. Did Obama not have a clue that right after his high profile French-fry-eating visit with Medvedev that word would break that a decade long investigation resulted in Russian “informants” being detained. Turning the ridiculous into the insane, the detainee in Cyprus was let go on bail and hasn’t shown up since. It certainly seems like amateur hour for the bureaucracies.
Bernanke’s Not Golden
When representative Paul Ryan was bold enough to call gold’s recent high prices “a vote of no confidence against fiat currencies” and solicit Federal Reserve Chairmen Ben Bernanke’s response, he stunningly played dumb:
“I don’t fully understand movements in the gold price,” Mr. Bernanke admitted. But he suggested it might be another example of investors fleeing risky assets and flocking to assets that are perceived as less risky, not only Treasury bonds, but also ones like gold.
Someone should needs to tell Bernanke he isn’t one tenth as slick as Greenspan. Hmm… just what would Greenspan have said? Well, we can imagine that he wouldn’t have said he didn’t know. Probably something more like, “While the recent price action of various commodities, including precious metals, might, no doubt – in part – be attributable to perceived fiscal and monetary policies, I could only speculate as to the specific driving forces behind the relative strengths of individual asset prices.” Sure, he’d be lying and talking in circles – but… isn’t that practically the Fed Chairman’s job?
In any case, June was a gloomy month, and has set the stage for a summer of thunderstorms. The best advice I can give is to simply be prepared. I can’t be wrong because I’m not predicting anything, and few people ever regret being prepared.
