John T. Reed’s news blog

Shorting USD inflation I recently wrote that your basic home with a mortgage was the world’s greatest short. You are shorting the US dollar losing purchasing power and you are doing that by borrowing a bunch of them.   The way the famous Wall Street shorts work is you sell a stock or option before you buy it at the expiration date of the option in the hope that it will fall in price below what your buyer has to pay you in the future. Such shorts have a limited upside but an unlimited downside-because the stock price can only...

A WSJ article today says deflation looms in China..What flation?.DEflation..Is that the opposite of inflation? In some ways, yes. I actually wrote a book on deflation. But I did not use that word. Why not? Americans do not understand it..The book is titled "How to Protect Your Life Savings from Hyperinflation & Depression.". https://johntreed.com/collections/john-t-reed-s-book-on-hyperinflation-and-depression/products/how-to-protect-your-life-savings-from-hyperinflation-and-depression.Is depression deflation? Yes..So the best "answer" to the question is deflation the opposite of inflation would be is depression the opposite of hyperinflation? Was the US in 1932 the opposite of Weimar Germany in 1922?.The worst thing to own in inflation is dollar-denominated assets. The worst...

On Friday's, the WSJ has a "Mansion" section. It is what it sounds like—expensive houses. . My most recent book advocated doing all your real estate investing via your principal residences and moving up to a more expensive one whenever you can do so safely. . . Generally, that would have you end up with a $5 to $10 million dollar house. But I also said NOT to buy more than one acre of lot nor more than about 3,500 square feet of interior home. . The Mansion section has some houses that comply with those two rules, but most...

WSJ's reporter in charge of bad-mouthing homes as an investment, Nicole Friedman, is having another big celebration of a tiny price movement. Front page line graph showing a steep plummet from the top of the graph to the bottom..Whew! What a horrible investment performance a home has been!.Uh, you need to read the description of what the graph depicts. You should probably write this down to decode it. This is a graph of the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller National Home Price Index showing the first year-over-year price decline in 11 years in April..How much was that decline? Wait for it...2%.Is there...

The “Numbers” column in the Saturday WSJ says basically that 30 million people, mostly young men, have dabbled in crypto and that five to six million bet their life savings on crypto and that this popularity means all the bankruptcies and lawsuits may not mean crypto is heading for oblivion. . Bull! 42% of Americans smoked in 1964. That was about 50 million, mostly men as with crypto. It is now around 12%. Conclusion? Things that are stupid being popular does not mean they are immune to the predictably resulting bankruptcies, prosecutions, regulations, and death rates. . There was a...