What happens on the Las Vegas Strip drives the rest of Las Vegas. Not a catchy ad line, just a fact. The hopes and dreams of hundreds, if not thousands of small and not-so-small businesses rest on whether the titans of the casino industry invest wisely, attracting millions of people to town so they may leave billions of dollars behind.
Eric Coffin captured the overall bear market funk that permeated this year’s Hard Asset Investment Conference in Las Vegas when he opened his presentation with, “This market stinks. No really, it stinks.” Coffin, co-proprietor of the Hard Rock Analyst, didn’t have many stock picks, so he suggested that attendees “drink heavily” and “don’t get out of your comfort zone.”
A punk economy is doing what legislators around the country could never do: shrink state and local governments. California Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger has declared a fiscal emergency because his state is $40 billion in the red and may actually be completely busted by February. He even “ordered state officials to prepare to furlough and lay off employees to cut costs,” according to Reuters, which would make the Golden State’s 8.4 percent unemployment rate still worse.
Whenever I see Fred Reed has penned a new piece, I smile immediately. And, the iconoclastic Reed never disappoints, writing with the wit and wisdom of a man who has been around the world, and remembers all the gritty details.
With the Wall Street cum Main Street meltdown, worries about a collapse of the Social Security system have been put off. Maintaining employment, putting food on the table and servicing the now-exploding payment on that negative-amortization, adjustable-rate, now underwater mortgage that seemed like such a good idea back when Alan Greenspan was the Maestro are what’s keeping Americans awake at night. Whether we will be able to draw from FDR’s what-Madoff-can-do-I-can-do-better program is a problem for another day.
As the state grows in power and influence seemingly each and every day, those speaking out are few and far between. It’s rarely a good career move. The local worthies don’t embrace the anti-state message. Few employers want the controversy. Seeking and speaking the truth is a lonely existence with benefits that don’t make you rich.
On April 27 the Standard & Poor’s rating agency downgraded the Greek government’s debt to junk status. Greece has been graded BB+ by the S&P, official “junk” territory. It is now on a par with Azerbaijan, Colombia, Panama, and Romania. The cost of Greek borrowing on a two-year bond was about 1.3% last November. By April 27 the cost stood at 19%.
Andy Duncan is wild for Doug French’s book: “You know you have crossed into the Austrian light when you wake up one morning and everything has become clear.
Looks like 2010 will bring in a bumper crop of great libertarian books:
The average Greek on the street isn’t wild about the new austerity measures being proposed by the IMF and EU that are considering bailing out their government.
Demonstrators set fire to a bank and three bank employees died.
“Greece is a unique and particular case in the EU” because of its “precarious debt dynamics” and because it “has cheated with its statistics for years and years,” EU Commissioner Olli Rehn said.
