This is it. This is your last wake-up call… At a recent breakfast, John Paulson, the most successful speculator of the last 20 years, explained exactly how the great inflation will come to pass. Says Paulson: The banks will resume regular lending – thereby releasing all of the excess money supply into the system – [...]

Dividends from a quality, well-diversified portfolio are much more predictable than capital gains and best of all, they are passive. You don’t have to do anything, they just show up in your brokerage account each quarter. Inflation? Not to worry, the good companies routinely raise their dividends well in excess of the inflation rate.
This week [...]

For all the great strides Wall Street has made in making investing easy and affordable for the average person over the past few decades, investing still costs money.
Most mutual funds have minimums in the thousands of dollars (not hundreds), and brokerage commissions make buying individual stocks prohibitively expensive if you only have a little to [...]

In the past few years, there’s been an explosion of investor interest in “hedges.”
Investors want to own foreign real estate for a hedge against a big depression in the United States. They want to own gold for a hedge against a dollar crisis. They want to own oil for a hedge against inflation.
But consider this [...]

Investors in natural gas stocks have lost their minds. They’re about to lose their wallets, too…
There’s a major wipeout coming in the natural gas business. North America has too many natural gas producers. The industry needs a major cleaning out. The most inefficient, high-cost producers must fold. This will bring supply and demand back into [...]

The consensus is almost always wrong, which is why today’s conventional wisdom that interest rates will drift higher merits examination.
If the consensus is wrong this time, too, it means one of two things:
* Interest rates will scream higher, clobbering adjustable-rate debtors and killing the economy.
* Interest rates will continue to drift lower, as [...]

World Bank President Robert Zoellick said the United States should not take the dollar’s status as the world’s key reserve currency for granted because other options are emerging.
In excerpts released on Sunday from a speech that he is to deliver on Monday, Zoellick said global economic forces were shifting and it was time now to [...]

Just like the government’s “cash for clunkers” program, investors are ready to cash in junk stock holdings for sounder equities, analysts say.
The stock market is up 57 percent since March 9, led by so-called junk stocks — or badly beaten names with hazy growth prospects. Many of have been in the financial sector, which [...]

World leaders set a course from recession to what they hope will be long-term recovery Friday by agreeing to seek a better balance between exporting and importing countries.
At the same time, they failed to take bold action on climate change or executive compensation — two issues that are viewed more urgently in Europe than the [...]

Just like the government’s “cash for clunkers” program, investors are ready to cash in junk stock holdings for sounder equities, analysts say.
The stock market is up 57 percent since March 9, led by so-called junk stocks — or badly beaten names with hazy growth prospects. Many of have been in the financial sector, which has [...]