Mark Yusko, CIO for a money management company, came out on the weekend and said “the US is going to have a crash and it will be massive.”
He believes that efforts to generate growth through fiscal stimulus and tax cuts will prove futile because the working-age population in the US is declining. As such, consumption—which makes up 70% of the US—will continue to fall.
Mark thinks instead of taking off, the US economy is on the cusp of a recession.
For more Yusko nonsense, click here.
What do I think?
You can’t predict.
Everyone who said that Trump’s election would cause a 20% drop in share prices was wrong! And there were many of them. I was one.
Our biggest lessons: Don’t try to time the market.
Dump shares whose earnings prospects have withered. Don’t dump them because “the market” is ripe for a crash.
That’s my entire investment philosophy from a long, happy weekend playing too much tennis.
But I still can play tennis. I still can run around the court. All that’s good.
Sadly, many of my friends have given tennis (and exercise) up because their shoulder hurts, their knees are done, they’re too old..etc.
Your future is probably not with startups. Two promising areas: drones and home food delivery have just hit a big bump in road. Reports Business Insider:
Sprig, a food-delivery startup that has raised over $56 million, is shutting down. (For more, click here.)
From MarketWatch, which is part of the Wall Street Journal
Is Rupert telling us to move all our money to Australia?
For more, click here.
How to protect yourself from ransomware. How to avoid being infected with ransomware:
+ Don’t open email attachments. Don’t click on pop-ups. Don’t visit “iffy” web sites.
+ Update your Windows and Apple (iOS) system software. Keep it updated. Windows will do it automatically if you click that option.
+ Always keep a backup of your working files on a flashdrive or two and keep them separate from your computer, so they don’t get infected.
Go out with a bang. Get yourself cremated. Stuff your ashes into bullets. And your heirs can shoot birds (or each other) with your ashes. From Holy Smoke’s priceless web site:
My friend smiled and said “You know I’ve thought about this for some time and I want to be cremated. Then I want my ashes put into some turkey load shotgun shells and have someone that knows how to turkey hunt use the shotgun shells with my ashes to shoot a turkey. That way I will rest in peace knowing that the last thing that one turkey will see is me, screaming at him at about 900 feet per second.
Reach Holy Smoke here.
Don’t do stupid
In his apartment, my friend has two steps down into his “sunken” living room. One night he was wearing socks — only socks. He tripped going up the stairs. This is what he accomplished.
Don’t do stupid. You’re not getting any younger. Your injury may never fully recover. You’re probably hobbling round because you don’t do enough exercise and you’re too heavy. And, soon, your government won’t pay to fix your stupidity. You’ll have to.
Keep moving. Stay thin.
Amazing medical. A dear friend was losing feeling in one arm because his neck was pinching the nerves. To relieve the pressure on the nerves, a brilliant surgeon opened his neck with a titanium mending plate and seven screws. He’s a view of the incredible procedure. My friend says the pressure is gone and he feels fine. Meantime, I’m super-impressed.
Sideways view:
Front view:
Eat your heart out that you don’t own one.
For more on this mechanical watch — you can see the working parts through the window on the back of the watch — click here.
California landslide.
These are before and after photos of California’s Highway 1.
Wrote Wired magazine:
The views from this ribbon of asphalt are so spectacular, and the terrain so gorgeous, that the feds declared it an “All-American Road” in 2002. People come from far and wide just to marvel at it. But much of the road was built on fragile ground in one of the most seismically tumultuous places in the world. Last weekend, the Earth reclaimed a sizable chunk of the highway.
More than 1 million tons of rock, dirt, and debris tumbled onto the highway on Saturday, burying one-third of a mile of road just south of Big Sur. John Madonna snapped this remarkable photo of the slide with a Canon PowerShot G1 from the window of his single engine plane. “It’s an epic landslide,” he says. “I think Mother Nature just said, ‘You know what Army Corps of Engineers? You don’t matter anymore. This thing is going into the ocean.”
Caltrans, the state agency charged with building and maintaining roads, has no idea when the road might open but said it will take months. “This is by far the worst we’ve ever seen,” agency spokesperson Susana Z. Cruz told The New York Times.
None of this surprised William Dietrich, professor of earth and planetary sciences at UC Berkeley. Scientists can’t predict landslides, of course, but they know where they’re likely to occur—and they’re a given on Highway 1. The road sits on the Franciscan formation, a stretch of marine sedimentary rocks and minerals like sandstone, mudstone, and salt smashed against the Northern American plate to form the coastline. Rocks shifted and weakened by constant seismic forces are further pummeled by the sea. Erosion creates cliffs so steep they eventually collapse. “It’s amazing they even put a road through there,” Dietrich says. “But it’s great they did because the views are so spectacular.” The views remain, even if the road, for now, does not.
Red-neck “humor.”
A State Trooper pulls over a pickup on Highway 16 and says to the driver, ‘Got any I.D.?’
The driver replies ‘Bout wut?’
The wedding …..
A father texts his son:
“My Dear Son, Today is a day you will treasure for all the days of your life.
My best love and good wishes.
Your Father.”
His Son texts back:
“Thanks Dad. But the wedding isn’t actually until tomorrow!”
His Father replies:
I know. I know.”
Harry Newton, who marvels. Amazon hit $1,000 this morning. My investment goal is to make enough on my Amazon shares to pay for all my Amazon purchases and then some. So far, I’m ahead of this game.
Dont remind me – I sold 1,000 shares of Amazon for about $30 each back during the great recession – that is why my stock advice is “dont do what I do”
You must have a great deal of influence at Amazon with all the stock you own…maybe you can get them to smarten up about delivering my orders. They must pay the USPS a great deal of money to make deliveries yet my post office refuses to deliver my last purchase saying they do not have a vehicle big enough to deliver a 5’x6′ grass strip I ordered…I am quite sure it is rolled-up one way or another. How am I supposed to know how big an item I can buy from Amazon? Obviously their shipping terminal is not smart enough to know when to ship USPS and when to ship it UPS.