People get used to new situations. At first they feel it strongly. Then they acclimate and they consider the new normal. When National Economy came out it sold well for about the first 6 months and then sales slowed until the big stock market fall in August. Then sales poured in.

And the hits this site gets keep going up even though I stopped marketing it. On the one hand people got used to the recession-depression starting in 2008, and when a new stock market fall hit interest renewed. But on the other hand the economic situation continues to slide. It keeps trending down and more and more people feel interested in figuring things out for themselves.

About the “Money Question” and alternative economics I think no other site even comes close to offering the resources on here. Just take a look at the 62 articles on the Articles page.

Even better I still stand by my book released in December 2008. I think the very first and best book to tackle the crash. Some things now I might like to revise or add, but the fundamental situation hasn’t changed. If you’ve got the interest buy the book. It comes with free shipping worldwide and a 365 day guarantee. If you don’t like it just send it back within a year.

And…I hate blogging. A lot. Some people love it. I don’t. It makes me think of the dentist. Currently working on another book which will tackle some of the same topics as National Economy but much more briefly and go into many other topics. Probably come out within a year. And I may start a daily email but don’t expect much in the way of blog updates.

If you want free quality content check out the Articles Page.

And if you want the best new economics  book around, with free shipping worldwide and a year long guarantee,  and the only one based on the lifelong work on a Nobel Prize winning scientist, grab a copy of my book. And click here to learn more about it.

Investment scams have been a regular part of the news the past ten years. All of these scams have a common element. They seek to induce heard behavior and then head in the opposite direction. The direction of the stampede is irrelevant as long as the scammer runs the opposite way.

The element of dishonesty is what make something a scam. Con artists say things they know are untrue to make money.

Here are the two most common investment scams:

Pump and Dump
The classic example of this scam in Enron. Use phony news, info, and stats to pump up the value of something temporarily and dump your shares in it while the price is still high. When the bubble pops everyone else will be left holding the bag and you’ll be sitting pretty.

Trash and Stash
This is the reverse of the pump and dump. A good example of this took place on August 25, 2000. A college student created a false press release and spread it on the internet. The release said Emulex would not meet earnings expectations. The company’s share price fell 62% in less than an hour. The scammer shorted the shares of Emulex and covered his short position with the temporarily cheap shares of Emulex to make his money.

Unless there’s a general rising tide you’ll never make money when you are part of the stampede. If you want to profit you have to set yourself apart from the crowd and do something different.

Played pool at the University of Michigan today with my brother. While we were playing it occurred to me how cushy of a job the poolroom attendant had. She basically had to sit in a chair and very rarely hand people a set of balls or take payment. The rest of the time she was either on facebook or watching a movie.

Getting paid to watch movies and surf the net isn’t half bad. Most of the Umich student jobs are like that, and they all pay over $9 an hour.

Thing is, the majority of the graduates from Umich aren’t going to be able to find jobs as good as the student jobs when they graduate.

My friends brother graduated from a very expensive film school a year ago. He had a part time contract film job for a couple months and since then nothing. He now works at BestBuy.

All that expensive college to get a job a 16 year old could have, and it doesn’t pay as well as a Umich student job and he actually has to do things other than sit in one place and read.

It goes to show how utterly worthless college is for most people when the jobs they can get working for the university while they’re students are better than the jobs than can get when they graduate.

On Monday my brother woke with a message from someone claiming to be a detective on his phone. Of course, even if you have done nothing wrong this is an alarming and unsettling event. The detective assured him at the end of his message that “he was not in trouble in any way” and he just needed to ask him something about a case. Of course, that’s no assurance, because police are allowed to lie and routinely do to get confessions.

My brother drives a bus and thought it had something to do with a really drunk man that had been on the bus the night before. I thought he shouldn’t call back the detective at all but he decided to call him back and we the call on speakerphone.

Was he calling about the drunken man? Nope. There had been a drive by BB gun shooting at the bus stop and he wanted to know if my brother had heard or seen anything.

BB shooting? This is what detectives spend their time on?? I shot my friend multiple times with a BB gun accidentally when I was a kid. Consequence: he got a little welt. I think he was wearing a t-shirt. This is Michigan. It’s cold. People are wearing winter gear. Worst case scenario getting shot with a BB stung a little. The only way it’s worth investigating is if someone got shot in the eye.

It just boggles my mind that the detective is actually paid to investigate this. Personally, I don’t think it needs to be investigated at all. If I was shot with a BB gun, not only would I probably not go through the large hassle of reporting it to the police but if the person got prosecuted I wouldn’t want to bother having to show up in court and be a witness. It’s much easier just to let it go.

What’s the point of keeping police around that have nothing better to do than to track down the BB Gun Bandits. Soon to be a major motion picture.

People think businesses are around to maximize their profits. For some of them it’s true, but a lot of businesses act like they don’t like to make money. Or, once they start making a certain amount they stop worrying about making any more.

The shoe company Clarks is my first example. Wanted to get some Wallabee Clarks. Of course I can’t buy shoes retail, because they’re all cheaper online, but it’s always good to get them sized at a store. Nobody carries them, though one woman told me people ask for them all the time and last year they sold out. Go figure. Maybe they should carry them then.

Journeys has Clarks Padmores. They’re identical to the Wallabees except the sole is made of a different material. The salesman says Clarks run a little large, and I size them. I’m a 10. Now, you would think that the sizing between Wallabee’s and Padmore’s would be about the same as they’re almost the same shoe. Nope. I get the Wallabees in the mail and it’s like I’m wearing boats. I think the correct size for me would have been a 9.

Here’s the thing. I have over 15 pairs of shoes. They are all either size 10 or 10.5. To me, a half size range among all the manufacturers doesn’t seem at all unreasonable. And yet Clarks sells shoes that would be a 9 on me. A full size smaller than the lower end of my range. They clearly don’t like to make money. Why not conform to the American shoe size standard? Every other company manages to do so. They certainly don’t benefit in any way by inventing their own sizing system and pretending like it’s the same as everyone else’s. End result: Clarks pissed me off and I returned the shoes. Sale lost.

Obviously they don’t care about making money otherwise they’d make shoes the correct size like every other company does, but instead they choose not to and it only loses them money.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m in the process of migrating the host to a new server, redesigning the theme, and in about two weeks this site is going to start being updated at least 4 times a week.

I was delighted when I read the article Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds. All the quotes below come from it. While the author thinks the Greeks suffer from a unique moral disease. I think they’re simply farther along the road to collapse than us.

Greek government bonds are rated as junk bonds. This isn’t a problem for Greece, because it can still borrow money from other governments. Greece is now a ward of other states.

Here’s what a senior IMF official said about Greece, “Our people went in and couldn’t believe what they found. The way they were keeping track of their finances—they knew how much they had agreed to spend, but no one was keeping track of what he had actually spent. It wasn’t even what you would call an emerging economy. It was a Third World country.” Read the rest of this entry »