I'd rather own the pound than the Euro. I think the right play is sell the Euro.

There is not much more the Federal Reserve can ease and it is stupid for them to ease over this. Of course, maybe that's why they are starting to expect it, the Federal Reserve being run the way it is.

You should be rooting for growth, however like Japan, when housing costs are artificially inflated way beyond income growth and economic growth, you get low, no, or negative growth. We are fortunate to have low growth. There is a cost to blowing asset bubbles. It has now gotten so bad corporations take on debt to buy shares and pay dividends and don't waste money investing in growth because there is none and the equation for optimal asset allocation is to have as little capital and as much leverage as possible. Likewise, although personal debt dropped it is now rising again. We need not talk about government debt, for it is always bad.

Growth causes inflation which is why TBTF banks would prefer if there is none. It destroys their perfect world of them getting free liquidity, dumping assets to the taxpayer at inflated prices, and being able to buy stocks and other assets others can't because their risk profile is different (low to no interest and a guaranteed taxpayer umbrella if things go bad). If anyone wonders why TBTF banks dominate stock trading these days, they aren't looking at the obvious.

Sadly gold and silver was not a good standard either. It was dependent on how much mining and how much leverage there was. Sadly eventually there was not enough of the former and way too much of the latter. The author is correct that now we are in a monetary system being used and abused and that has overleveraged and added so much risk we dare not even talk about it. The risk is in the form not talked about here, it is in derivatives that have grown bigger than the trees in the forest and is now bigger than the forest itself.

Any major hiccup in them may mean liabilities that exceed all the money in the world. That makes it hard to pay back and counter party risk is high because everyone knows no one can logically insure, protect, etc. each other from default. the Federal Reserve's balance sheet is a sad state given it expanded when the US wasn't in a recession to the point QE will be hard to do when the US economy falters and they can't drop rates in a downturn even 1%.

Failure to manage risk is an understatement when it comes to the Federal Reserve and their soviet style command economy beliefs. It is killing, not helping Americans although the TBTF banks love it. They love it so much that they will crash the economy just to keep things this way forever. After all, growth will end zirp which gives them greater margins and free cash flow and QE enables the taxpayer to buy up their assets hidden from all to view at a premium. Despicable.

The dollar rose, however, more than likely the UK will need to buy the pound and Europe will need to buy the Euro cutting down or actually selling US dollars. More than likely they will both agree to hold each others currency to stabilize the transition. I think the market will come to realize this fact and the holding off on such talks is not productive to either side.

I think this is relatively good. If people haven't noticed the "recovery" is not happening but rather people are tightening their belt by eating out less, going to the movies less, buying clothes less, and spending extravagantly less. This is probably because they are being clobbered by inflation that isn't tracked, that is housing inflation that is still growing well in excess of income gains.

"Those somethings are debt, inflation, job insecurity, medical costs, and higher education costs, among other influences. Those forces are are eating away at the ability of an increasing number of US households to afford the purchase of a home. We can lay the first three of those forces directly on the doorstep of the Fed, which promotes easy credit and financial engineering schemes which sap the lifeblood out of the US economy." Well said. The other force is housing inflation which is caused by the Federal Reserve and is growing much faster than income growth or the rest of inflation by a large margin.

The end game is for financial companies to manufacture enough junk REIT trusts to offload property and leverage them up so they will take the fall like the high yield REIT bond holders did in the last collapse. Apparently they think investors are as dumb as ever and don't think. Sadly, they may be right about that as many people are chasing dividends that are unsustainable with leverage to buy assets that are artificially high. Yikes.

Those in power tend to say whatever to stay in power. It is hard to claim that they lie because lying requires that they know the truth. Sadly, it would seem that many of them are too stupid to know much of anything let alone the truth. Thus they change their stories to fit whatever gives them power much like Trump supported Hillary the last Presidential election and now thinks she's unable to do anything this election, or was liberal the last presidential election and now is an ultra conservative without fiscal conservativism or moral conservatism which appears to leave only anti-immigration and semi-racist overtones that are even against free and open markets and capitalism's advances in the world.

We will see. It seems that there is strong forces keeping the wide trading ranges in play although the downside is giving way steadily and in a controlled fashion. I don't think Brexit is a catalyst for a US market downturn, but certainly a shake up in policy from whoever is elected could easily be a catalyst for a decline.

Given the length of this cycle and the weakness coupled by the Federal Reserve's lack of control for protecting the US from any downturn, it certainly makes sense to take a cautious approach and keep money on the side to protect against the inevitable market downturn, whenever, and however it comes about.

I found the author's lumber indicator interesting. It certainly is not a indicator many follow and is less likely to be manipulated. Good job.

This is not as disastrous as it is being made out to be. Banks that gambled on the pound deserve to learn to stop gambling before the taxpayers need to bail them out again. Of course, because the taxpayers will have to is why they won't stop until they are forced to. And you thought welfare recipients take advantage of the government. TBTF Banks are the biggest welfare recipients in America.