Peak Prosperity

Chris and Adam have been on a ship this week, presenting at The Real Estate Investor Summit At Sea. We were able to steal away for an hour to sit down with fellow presenter Simon Black (founder of SovereignMan.com) and this excellent discussion ensued. We didn't have any agenda prepared; it's just us three riffing and sharing our thoughts on the most likely implications of the biggest macro risks that have our attention right now.

To all those investors expecting the Fed to step in to backstop the recent weakness seen in the stock market, Wolf Richter warns: The cavalry isn't coming. After years of force-feeding too much liquidity into world markets, the central banking cartel is now aware of the Franken-markets it has created. And now with a new head at the US Federal Reserve, and soon at the ECB, central bankers have shifted their priority from supporting asset prices to now actively engineering lower prices. They just don't want prices to drop too far too fast.

We all learned in grade school that the Pilgrims sailed to North America to escape religious persecution. That's wasn't necessarily the case, explains author John Butman. At least, it certainly isn't the whole story. In fact, the Pilgrim's voyage to the New World was a seventeenth-century entrepreneurial start-up. It was funded by nearly one hundred investors, who expected a profit on their contributed capital.

Steen Jakobsen, Chief Investment Officer and Chief Economist of Saxo Bank, is sounding a clear warning of an arriving market correction. Over-inflated asset prices, over-crowded trades, anemic market liquidity, and a continued decline in the credit impulse set the table for a banquet of consequences, in Steen's view. Confident a market correction of at least 15% lies ahead, Jakobsen urges investors to exit leveraged positions and build cash. As for a longer view, he predicts commodities will be one of the best asset classes to own over the next five to ten years:

Author and commentator James Howard Kunstler returns as our podcast guest this week for an update on where we are in The Long Emergency timeline. In this wide-raging discussion ranging from the pervasiveness of propaganda in today's media to the risk of nuclear war, Kunstler also re-news his warnings of a current secular economic slowdown.

Dr. Charles Hall may not be a name you instantly recognize, but it should be. Now a Professor Emeritus of the College of Environmental Science and Forestry, Dr. Hall is a rigorous researcher of energy, oil, biophysical economics -- and was a critical early pioneer in developing the key resource metric of Energy Returned On Energy Invested (EROEI).

Economists are supposed to monitor and analyze the economy, warn us if risks are getting out of hand, and advise us on how to make things runs more effectively - right? Well, even though that's what most people expect from economists, it's not at all how they see their role, warns CFA and and behavioral economist Daniel Nevins.

Fred Hickey, frequent cited expert on Bloomberg News and Barron's Roundtable, has been publishing his author extremely well-respected investment newsletter, The High-Tech Strategist, for 31 years. And he is more worried about the state of the financial markets today than he's ever been.

On this podcast, we're joined by Timo Marshall, co-founder of Spirit Works Distillery. In today's discussion, Timo walks through the basic science underlying the distillation process, what differentiates the most common spirits from one another, and what resources are available to those interested in taking up the practice.

The recent gut-wrenching drop in asset prices began on the first day of the job for new Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. Chris has back on the podcast Danielle DiMartino Booth to discuss these recent events.

Art Berman, 40-year veteran in the petroleum production industry and respected geological consultant, returns to the podcast this week to talk about oil.

Energy analyst and professional actuary Gail Tverberg returns to the podcast this week to revisit the global energy outlook. And fair warning, Gail warns it is quite grim.

In this final podcast of 2017, Chris sits down with Robert Helms and Russell Gray, better known as The Real Estate Radio Guys. They run one of (if not the most) popular podcasts on real estate investing.

Whether or not you've had time yet to plow your way through David Collum's excellent 2017 Year in Review, our annual podcast with Dave always brings additional color to light - and this year's is no exception.

This week, Chris sits down with HAA executive Ed D'Agostino to discuss the role of gold (and silver) in an investment portfolio during the age of bitcoin and endless central bank liquidity.