John T. Reed’s news blog

A reader just told me he has a lease option that expires tomorrow and he has a great bargain price. The seller says he will renege. That is ILLEGAL. It is also irrelevant. . HOWEVER, the lessee/optionee must exercise the option by tendering the money. I told him to get a lawyer TODAY and make sure he exercises the option according to its terms before the deadline which he said was 5/31/21. . If you do not tender the money because the guy said he would renege, he wins. You have to ignore his words and tender the money. ....

Jason Zweig says I bonds are super investments. The I stands for inflation. You can only buy $10,000 a year, although you can get more per year by overpaying your estimated taxes and taking your tax refund in the form of I bonds. He says they yield more than 3.5% and they are nearly risk free. They are federally guaranteed government bonds. I will give credit for one thing: Only $46.4 billion are outstanding. That is analogous to, although much larger than, the number of Forever stamps outstanding. The interest from these bonds is exempt from state and local income...

Interesting article about the current home-buying frenzy being everywhere other than NYC and San Francisco, including in small towns. 20% of buyers are investors. Makes sense. I just wrote a book saying the principal residence is the most advantaged investment on earth. Investors are buying rental houses not residences, but they compete against investors and will likely sell to owner occupants. My wife and I are investors 70% on the house we just bought. Our son Mike is a resident for the other 30%. The couple featured in the article looked at 50 houses with the same Realtor. The couple...

One of my sons wondered if he was going to lose his job due to hyperinflation. I need to address that. It is in my book but not a focus. . During hyperinflation or just plain high inflation which we Americans got a belly full in the late 1970s and early 1980s, people still work. Indeed, they get raises. Duh. . I often tell of the factory workers in Germany getting paid twice a day—at lunch and at end of day—and they had to let them off work after lunch for an hour or so so they could sped the...

Lots of stock market analysts put out buy and sell signals. I very rarely do that. I am doing it now. Sell the US dollar—on an emergency basis. Put it into hard assets a.k.a. non-dollar denominated assets, some of them liquid. Do NOT put yourself into a position where if hyperinflation does NOT happen or does not happen SOON, that you will be in trouble. In other words, DO NOT BET THE FARM on hyperinflation happening soon. Yes, that would give you the biggest benefit if it DID happen soon, but predicting such things is not precise enough for that....