by Edward Hugh: Barcelonabr /br /Well, one good turn deserves another. So if, a href="http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/"like Paul Krugman/a (and me, I think, though I hadn't gotten as far as thinking through all the implications of what was happening when I posted the original piece) you take the view a href="http://fistfulofeuros.net/afoe/economics-and-demography/as-the-politicians-battle-it-out-ukraines-economy-tunnels-south-in-search-of-australia/"the Ukraine industrial output chart I put up yesterday/a could be the smoking gun (or starter's pistol, or line judge flag, or whichever metaphor works for you) that tells us that the second great global depression in the history of modern industrial capitalism may now have begun, then here are some more of those tell-tale charts to put in you pipe and smoke - or if , like Huck Finn that is your preference, to chew on.br /br /br /Of course it is entirely possible that Paul Krugman is only saying that a Great Depression has broken out in Ukraine, and obviously ...

strong/stronga href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ngczZkrw340/SVFAWkhXc8I/AAAAAAAAL3k/ueQYKIgYSc0/s1600-h/hrvynia.png"img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5283074594387227586" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 159px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ngczZkrw340/SVFAWkhXc8I/AAAAAAAAL3k/ueQYKIgYSc0/s320/hrvynia.png" border="0" //abr /br /blockquotep“In Ukraine, the evidence is still that policymakers do not quite understand the seriousness of the challenges they face,”. Timothy Ash, analyst at the Royal Bank of Scotland. /pp“There is a burgeoning economic crisis in the European periphery,” Krugman said on the ABC network Dec. 14. “The money has dried up. That’s the new center, the center of this crisis has moved from the U.S. housing market to the European periphery.” /p/blockquoteMake no mistake about it. What is taking place right now in Ukraine is extraordinarily serious. The IMF have recently agreed a support loan to the country, but the politicians themselves still can't agree on whether or not they are actually going to abide by the conditions attached to it. Meantime, as we can all see on ...

The ink on the post below suggesting that I would wind down for Christmas (and exam preparation) has hardly dried before I am forced back into action (more or less that is). And the occasion? Well, I am not going into too much background here, but one event important to remember (out of so many this year) was the announcement of the € 1.7 billion IMF stand-by-agreement for the Baltics. The bail-out plan itself is not so interesting in the sense that it has been on the drawing board for a some months, but the juicy part was the firm IMF position that the euro pegs should remain (and presumably that this means a future for Euro membership). This surprised me since I have been relentlessly arguing that whatever kind of route the Baltics would take out of the current mess it would be one in which the pegs would need to ...

Here are three things you can buy now to capitalize on spiking unemployment, crashing banks and the tumbling dollar. Earlier this week, Chairman Bernanke and his cronies on the U.S. Federal Reserve did the unthinkable, indeed the unimaginable.

In an effort to demonstrate how serious they are about this whole “recession thing,” they stated that their new interbank loan rate target was zero. Zip. Nada.

When asked if this meant they had run out of bullets, Bernanke implied they could always simply inject money directly into the system by buying billions of dollars worth of Treasury bonds.

This is actually a peculiar thought, because Treasury bonds are the one asset that is actually in demand these days (whereas dollar demand is actually rather tepid).

In fact, Chairman Bernanke’s rather alarming statement caused the U.S. dollar to fall against the euro by the biggest amount in

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“Keynesian” economics has been given a bad name by unprecendeted government bailouts this year. But John Maynard Keynes was also a great investor says Dr. Mark Skousen. His strategy was to buy preferred stocks of quality, high-dividend companies when everyone else was selling. Mark says today’s investors can follow this advice for big long-term gains with the John Hancock Preferred Income Fund (NYSE:HPI).

This from Investment U:

“Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” ~John Maynard Keynes, 1936

When it comes to the best strategy to use during a treacherous bear market, I turn to advice from my favorite guru. The British economist, John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), made a ton of money during the Great Depression.

It was he who turned the world upside down in

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div align="justify"A blind monkey throwing darts would beat the average investment bank oil analyst, whether forecasting weekly inventory levels or the future oil price. At the peak of the historic investment bubble in oil futures back in July, they were falling over themselves to predict $170-200 oil in 2009. Now it's $25. Everyone from central bankers to the CFTC and leading economists (or 'misleading' economists as people like Paul Krugman should be labelled) claimed the price was based on fundamentals. They were wrong then, and they'll be wrong again. Back in May in a href="http://deadcatsbouncing.blogspot.com/2008/05/its-oil-price-stupidbut-for-how-long.html"span style="color:#cc0000;"It's the Oil Price Stupid, But for How Long More?/span/a (and right through the July peak) I was resolutely contrarian and wrote: /divdiv align="justify"em'Far from worrying about $200 a barrel oil in the foreseeable future, I would stress test my portfolio for sub $100 oil, which is far more likely from these levels. At a ...

Another week and another batch of fascinating video clips about bailouts, economic woes and other crisis-related matters. As to be expected, the good-news videos are in rather short supply. A number of the more interesting clips that have attracted my attention are shared below.

Some of my favourites included in this compilation are: “Peter Schiff uses analogies to describe crisis” (first one up) and “Dr Doom [Marc Faber] - Buffett’s approach to investing is dead” (further down). If you want to view only two of these clips, make sure to see these two.

Please post any interesting video links that you would like to share with the Investment Postcards community, in the comments section.

YouTube: Peter Schiff uses analogies to describe crisis “Ron

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Forget talk of a slump in gold, says Justice Litle. The precious metal is still on a long-term uptrend that started in 2001. And the “reflate at all costs” strategy of the Fed will eventually send gold soaring again as the world wakes up awash with dollars that it doesn’t want.

This from Taipan Daily:

Take a look at this long-term gold futures chart.

Stepping out to a longer-term chart is a bit like seeing the world from a higher altitude. As you head further out, the drama begins to recede. (From a far enough distance, the world is little more than a pale blue dot – as Carl Sagan liked to point out.)

So, too, with gold. There has been a lot of yellow metal angst in light of the recent credit implosion. But if we look back to

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Brad Setser says "Ut-Oh", beating me to the punch on the September trade release, which showed US exports plunging. It's a post that Paul Krugman rightly expresses some angst upon reading. And now I'm going to add two more reasons to worry (not that I think Setser and Krugman aren't aware of these points).

First, after reflecting upon the collapse of exports noted by Setser, think "disaggregate".

Figure 1 depicts exports of capital goods; they declined 10%, exceeding the 8% reported for all goods exports (all calcuations in log terms). That's 10% for September alone. Since the standard deviation of monthly log changes is 3.1% (2004M02-08M9), well, that's pretty significant... Why focus on capital goods exports (more so than say ag exports), given their volatility? Because they represent foreign demand for goods that can be used to produce things; as demand for capital goods goes down, so too should

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Today, Ben Bernanke proposed another fiscal stimulus package for the wilting economy. More evidence that we’re living in a Keynesian world, says Bill Bonner. When the private sector falters, the government is ready to pick up the slack. And it doesn’t matter how much it costs. Bill says trillion-dollar deficits are on the way, and that’s bad news for the US dollar.

This from the Daily Reckoning:

Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman is, of course, a Keynesian. All economists – or practically all – are now Keynesians. So are all government officials. “We’re all Keynesians now,” announced Richard Nixon in the ‘70s.

That is, they all believe that government has to manage the economy – in a macro-economic way.

The theory is simple: when private industry and private consumers drop the ball…the government should pick it up and run

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