http://mastery-money.com/wp One man's observation of how wealth is created, manipulated and destroyed. Wed, 05 Nov 2008 01:47:42 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en There has been a lot of talk in the papers recently about not paying bonuses to the employees of Wall Street firms. The logic is as follows: Since most of the financial community has been devastated and have been forced to borrow money from the treasury, why should the banks pay ... http://mastery-money.com/wp/2008/11/05/bonuses.html http://mastery-money.com/wp/2008/11/03/technorati-profile.html While politicians have been adding more regulations and laws, the Treasury has continued to add liquidity to the system and yet the markets have continued to fall. It reminds me of the old Humpty Dumpty story " All the kings horses and all the kings men could not put Humpty ... http://mastery-money.com/wp/2008/10/22/humpty-dumpty.html Part of the reason we are having a melt down in the financials right now is that the market does not understand the position of the financials. For example in mid July of 08 Merrill wrote down 9.8 billon of assets only to be followed by another 5.7 billon on ... http://mastery-money.com/wp/2008/07/31/truth-and-the-markets.html Gresham’s Law states that whenever government overvalues one form of money and undervalues another, the undervalued money will leave the country or disappear into "hoarding," while the overvalued money will flood into circulation. Hence the saying, "Bad money drives out the good." In the early 1960s U.S coins were made ... http://mastery-money.com/wp/2008/05/16/bad-money-drives-out-good.html I am a big proponent for lower taxes for a variety of reasons, but one of the main reasons I don't like them is because taxes are inflationary. All of the current political candidates answer to our current problems is to raise taxes. The economy is going south, we have ... http://mastery-money.com/wp/2008/03/24/taxes-are-inflationary.html There was a brilliant article last Friday in the FT by Gillian Tett that bears worth reading. "The Vicious Spiral That Haunts the Debt Markets” “The western financial system is caught in a trap … on the one hand, there is an urgent need for clearing prices to be established ... http://mastery-money.com/wp/2008/03/11/caught-in-a-trap.html If you have been following the financial markets for the last few months, you probably would have noticed that the market is being driven by credit fears. More simply put- people are not paying for the things that they bought which is pushing the equities market down. In particular it ... http://mastery-money.com/wp/2008/02/21/why-the-sub-prime-mess-will-take-months-to-unwind.html Buying from outside the US: Most people don't think it's a bad thing to buy from China. I tend to agree with that because most people would rather pay less for item than more. It only becomes a problem when as a country we don't sell enough of our U.S goods ... http://mastery-money.com/wp/2008/02/20/buying-stuff.html It use to be on the old days that when you wanted to buy a house you had to talk to your local banker to get a loan. If the loan went bad and you did not pay the loan, you were forced out of our house and the banker ... http://mastery-money.com/wp/2008/02/12/bankers-and-the-current-crisis.html