Financial Sense is a website that is very educational for people interested in investing and learning more on how the financial world works.
I like to listen to the News Hour which is essentially a podcast with a review of the the previous week's market action and then they have various interviews with different authorities on different topics.
Even though they call it the News Hour, the program itself can go on for over two hours and sometime even over three hours, so you get a lot of information and obviously learn a lot. It is usually available every Saturday afternoon (Japan time) and I use iTunes to download it and listen to it.
The August 31st edition of the Financial Sense News Hour was an encore presentation where they replayed three interviews from earlier in the year. Below are some observations and learnings that I got from the program.
The first hour was an interview with a gentleman named Neil Irwin who wrote a book called The Alchemist, http://tinyurl.com/lhzaju5. It talks about the economic crisis between 2007 and 2009. Something that the world hadn't seen since The Great Depression of the 30's. It focuses on the three major central banks in the world, the US, the UK and Europe.
Apparently we were extremely close to the collapse of the world economic system which is quite scary if you think about it because some of these people wield an unbelievable amount of power and can change you life and in instant.
An interesting reminder I got out of this interview was that money is just an idea. For many people that is a very uncomfortable concept. Another interesting reminder was when they spoke of history of the central banks and they linked it to Germans taking wheelbarrows of cash to the local supermarket to do their shopping. I must admit I can't even comprehend that and I can imagine that is what happened and maybe is still happening in Zimbabwe where hyperinflation was rampant.
In the end the consensus was that if they had a choice they would have taken what happened recently to what happened in the 30's and 40's.
As a result I bought the book and look out for a review of that book in upcoming blog posts.
The second hour was an interview with Martin Armstrong and once again there were a few interesting things that I took out of that interview.
The fact that there are $20 trillion in pension funds with the government thinking of taking over all pensions. The reason being that the US is in $17 trillion of debt so they see that as a way out. (On a side note, you can imagine some corrupt countries doing that without batting an eyelid.)
This interview was quite scathing towards our politicians in particular saying that if you or I had some insider information that we would probably get chucked in jail but a Congressman does not have that same problem. So in other words what is good for the goose is definitely not good for the gander. He also said that it is the advisers running the show, not the politicians. The politicians are just the mouth pieces.
Finally he talked about rogue traders and how they are just the fall guys. It is something that I have suspected for a long time as well how the hell do these banks not know that one of their employees is betting billions of dollars. The powers that be, surely must know. It sounds as though they just let the Nick Lessons of this world take the fall.
That reminds me of a Michael J. Fox line in the movie American President in which he basically says he is not going to do something because it is not the president who takes the fall but someone like the adviser who spends six months in jail.
In the end, the host of the show, Jim Puplava says and I agree with him that it is good to listen to guys like Martin because the press is basically run by the government and they only produce what they are allowed.
I recommend that you go to FinancialSense.com and have a listen or read the articles. It is a fantastic website and program. Long may it continue.
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