Weekend Reading

I should have saved the $5.00 and not bought the Barron's this weekend.

They ARE paying attention to the mess in Europe as well as OccupyWallStreet.  Wondering in both cases what is real and how deep these two subjects go...  As ZH has reported, it is not just smelly young and old hippies doing OWS, they have gotten some support from some on Wall Street itself.

Barron's has a special section on mutual funds, that would be worth a look for anyone holding those.

Andrew Bary has nice things to say about Junk Bonds, but "no gracias" for me.  Are you kidding?

Pharma stocks Bayer. Merck and Roche got positive coverage.

"Commodities Corner" article was about pork (pigs, that is) for China.  Bullish they say...

No real change on the Fed's Balance Sheet nor in the Money Supply nor Monetary Base.

Yawn...

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Jim Willie CB (goldenjackass.com is his website, and it will point you where to go to read his latest) put out another dragon-fire-breathing piece on how Treasuries having such a low yield is evidence of broken our markets are!

Jim Willie is perhaps the Internet's most prominent bear!  He typically puts out his growling-est bearish  articles about three times per month.  24hgold.com almost always has his articles up on Thursday or Friday (when Jim publishes), but he can be found at other sites too.

He provides (as he often does) a brief technical analysis of gold and what he thinks will happen (it will go up).

Jim Willie does NOT think like FOFOA does though.  I think FOFOA has it right on what is going to happen to gold.  As I always do, I refer anyone not familiar with him (IMO the BEST gold analyst out there) to get a bunch of time free and go to his blog and start in:

fofoa.blogspot.com

(Disclosure: I contribute.  And if you like his stuff, you should too.)

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Zero Hedge is following the whole mess in Europe admirably well (like I have tell you all that).  I believe that Europe is very important to watch.

A BAD Greek default will have more impact than is generally realize, in this Junior Blogger's opinion.  Bad things happening in Europe will lead to bad things happening here.

Prepare accordingly.

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Over the last several days I finished reading two books:

In the Plex (Steven Levy), a really good book on Google and how it works.  It was published in April 2011 and seems already obsolete...  Levy did write about Google's face-off with Facebook (now up to 800,000,000 users, almost all fo our employees at Ameru are on Facebook!), I just have started seeing Google trying to strike back with its new Social Network (Google +) which I am sure all "gmail" people have seen by now.  The book at all, it IS very good.  But, change is fast on the Internet...


Bloodmoney (David Ignatius) is an espionage story about (mostly) Pakistan.  Excellent reading!  I enjoy books about Big Money, High Stakes, Action, etc.  It's all there if you like the same kind of reading.  Pakistan.  Hmm.  Pakistan and Nigeria are two of the worst places in the world I read.  I would not go to either one unless you have someone you know and trust in either place.  (Go to Peru instead!)