Harry S. Dent Jr.'s Blog, page 157

What Stock Losses Are You Willing to Accept?

Earlier this year I told you to

An Insider’s Take: How the Fed Ruined the Economy

Let’s start this off with a quote by Ben Bernanke to get your blood boiling:

When the economic well-being of their nation demanded a strong and creative response, my colleagues at the Federal Reserve, policymakers and staff alike, mustered the moral courage to do what was necessary, often in the face of bitter criticism and condemnation.

He has a memoir coming out in October called The Courage to Act. The courage to act!? Artificially inflating the economy with worthless money is about the least courageous thing I can think of.

There was one Fed governor I actually trusted, but he resigned in 2011. His name was Kevin Warsh. Bush appointed him in 2006, making him the youngest Fed governor ever at age 35.

His view is directly in line with people like

Economic Volatility: The Oxygen of Your Investment Strategy

I must admit… I’m a Boy Scouts of America dropout.

But I did

What is the Fed Feeding us? Truth or Lies?

Communication is key. The Fed didn’t always understand that, but over the years they’ve learned that communication and transparency are important to anyone affected by their policy decisions.

Before the early 1990s, the Fed didn’t even announce when they had made a policy change. That made it much more difficult for Fed watchers to decipher what they did, much less what their intentions were.

In past Fed minutes, former Fed chair Alan Greenspan joked about increasing transparency in policy announcements, and the lack thereof in their participation in the coupon market. Another Fed official joked: “The more transparent you get, the more everybody wants.”

But today, the Fed is

What’s Next? Will Quantitative Easing Demolish Stock Indicators?

In late 2008, we knew we had a problem.

For years we had used the

Investment Strategy. True or False: “Invest In What You Know”?

Peter Lynch is one of the all-time greats. While running the Fidelity Magellan Fund from 1977 to his retirement in 1990, he generated almost hard-to-believe annualized returns of 29.2% per year. And that was before the roaring bull market of the 1990s.

If there were a pantheon of investing gods, no one would question Peter Lynch’s place in it.

But Lynch was also responsible for some of the most misunderstood investment advice in history: “Invest in what you know.”

This is actually pretty solid advice — if used right. Wall Street analysts and fund managers often never leave their elegant New York offices. That means regular, everyday investors can see a budding trend years before Wall Street, simply by virtue of having boots on the ground. Lynch routinely wrote that some of his best investment ideas came from trips to the mall.

But this is where

Another Retirement Benefit Gets the Axe

Broken promises make for lousy relationships, which is one reason public sector workers and their employers are on the outs. Many government entities promised rich pensions to their workers and are now trying to back out of the deal as

You Can’t Have New Technology Without Critics

The same Department of Defense agency best known for developing stealth airplanes, laser-guided bombs, and the Internet, is now turning its attention to synthetic biology.

That’s right, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — better known as

Geopolitics and Stocks: It All Comes Down to Physics

The third law of physics is: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. That’s why

The Stock Market & Gross Domestic Income: A Crucial Correlation

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