Friday, March 29, 2013

Too many students doing their MBA

In 1958, America produced 5,000 MBAs per year and none of the other countries produced any. Last year we produced 200,000, and the rest of the world produced tens of thousands more. We have a glut, we have a lot more MBAs than we used to, there’s a huge amount of competition in that field, in finance. And nearly all MBAs these days study finance. In the old days some of them studied manufacturing, or marketing, or accounting, or other things. Now it’s nearly all finance.

This is at a time when there’s massive debt and leverage in the financial community. You know, back in the 60s and 70s there was very low leverage in the financial community, many investment banks were partnerships, partners weren’t about to go and risk their entire fortunes with leverage.

And of course now you have governments around the world antagonistic to finance, passing laws and regulations all the time, trying to come down hard on financial types. Finance, which was a backwater and pretty much ignored by everybody including students, has now become, in the 80s, 90s, and the last 10 or 15 years, wildly hot and popular. That’s why I’m saying this is going to change. Throughout history we’ve had long periods where the financial types were the masters of the universe, followed by long periods when the people who produced real goods were. Well, that’s changing now, going back to the old ways. We have more people in America studying public relations than studying agriculture. More people study physical education than study mining engineering.

So how much more do you need to know? 10,000 people studied agriculture last year while 200,000 got MBAs.

Thursday, March 28, 2013

Invest in things you know

Nobody should invest in anything that they themselves don’t understand. So if I sat here and said you should do x, y, z, and people don’t have a clue what I’m talking about, they should probably ignore what I say or even what you say.

Nobody should invest in something that they don’t understand. If you know nothing about gold except that it’s supposedly valuable, you shouldn’t buy it, or invest in anything you don’t know about.

But once you know a lot about something, you will probably figure out some ways to protect yourself. I mean if you have your own business, like you, usually the best thing to invest in is your own business, because you know more about that than anything else. I have various ways that I’m trying to protect myself, but even if I told you I’m doing x, I might change my mind tomorrow afternoon, and then you would be stuck doing x because I said it. I’m not going to call you and tell you I changed my mind on that position. So people really need to invest in only what they themselves know a lot about.

Friday, March 8, 2013

US treasuries bubble can burst


US treasuries is probably one of the last remaining asset bubbles left in the world. To buy them now would be a “terrible mistake”.

The US Federal Reserve's continued quantitative easing measures should help hard assets.

Thursday, March 7, 2013

Japanese can make money investing at home

They[Japanese Investors] will soon start losing money on the money invested abroad so a massive amount of that money is going to come back home. I doubt that will go into bank deposits or bonds because interest rates are so low. Then at least they can go to commodities or stocks.

Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Sideways range bound for stocks

Stocks, in my view, in most countries are like they were in the 1970s.

In the 1970s stock markets, and economies around the world did not do very much and were in a big sideways trading range for many years. We are in that kind of period now. 

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Agriculture can be a inflation protector

I suspect agriculture products would give better protection during the next several years although gold and silver will be good too – perhaps second best.

Monday, March 4, 2013

Rogers long commodities and currencies


I'm long commodities and currencies, because if the world gets better, the shortages in commodities will make sure I make money; if the world economy doesn't get better, I'd rather own commodities because they're going to print money.