It’s fascinating how investors come to forget that markets move in cycles and not perpetual diagonal lines. As value investor Howard Marks wrote in The Most Important Thing, “Rule number one: most things will prove to be cyclical. Rule number two: some of the greatest opportunities for gain and loss come when other people forget rule number one.” A normal, run-of-the mill cyclical bear market wipes out more than half of the preceding bull market advance.
Where we are today
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2014/06/investor-bets-in-risky-vs-safe-assets.html
All of the above doesn’t mean an imminent reversal of trend only that investors are acting as if risk is low. Remember Buffett’s line, “Be fearful when people are greedy and greedy when people are fearful.”
Skyscraper Index (or curse)
http://library.mises.org//media/Audio/The New 20 Skyscraper Curse.mp3
http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Skyscraper_Index
Central Bank Stimulus Will Not Work
The governments and central banks of the world are engaged in a futile effort to stimulate economic recovery through an expansion of fiat money credit. They will fail due to their ignorance or purposeful blindness to Say’s Law that tells us that money is the agent for exchanging goods that must already exist. New fiat money cannot conjure goods out of thin air, the way central banks conjure money out of thin air. This violation of Say’s Law is reflected in loan losses, which cannot be prevented by any array of regulation or higher capital requirements. In fact rather than stimulate the economy to greater output, bank credit expansion causes capital destruction and a lower standard of living in the future than would have been the case otherwise. Governments and central bankers should concentrate on restoring economic freedom and sound money respectively.
Read more: http://mises.org/daily/6770/Why-Central-Bank-Stimulus-Cannot-Bring-Economic-Recovery
http://www.oftwominds.com/blogjune14/buying-time6-14.html