Rob Cheng’s Blog

It has been over 6 months, since George Bush went in front of the entire nation and told us all that we are all screwed. He succeeded in putting the nation into a panic setting the stage for an unprecedented flurry of government spending. After 1/2 a year of spending, none of the stimulus has had any impact whatsoever. Employment continues to rise, housing prices plummet, and GDP is still shrinking.

The underlying theory behind the “shop til you drop” stimulus plan is Keynesian economics which became popular during the last depression. Unfortunately, Keynesian economics will nor work this time. The primary reason is that the United States is broke. In the last 50 years, our great country has been transformed from the largest creditor nation to the largest debtor nation. We are broke, and we are addicted to spending more money than we have. Addicted is the only appropriate word, and like an addict, there is only one solution. We must wean ourselves from the addiction, rather than borrow more money. Obama and Bush have been feeding the addiction. More »

March 18th, 2009 | Category: Financial Crisis, Politics | Leave a comment

The Fed announced two months ago that they would drop America’s key interest rate to .25% giving America the unique distinction of having the lowest interest rates in the world. In addition, although Congress is still wrangling, they will soon pass one of the largest spending bills in the history of the nation, wrapped up in a bow and called economic stimulus. Although, it sure smells like pork. These two events have one key thing in common – printing more money. In fact, the United States will begin printing money at an unprecedented rate, not just in the history of our nation, in the history of the world.

Ultimately, I believe these policies will fail. Furthermore, their policies are designed to promote consumption and penalize savings. I refuse to fall into this trap. I believe that saving money is always prudent, and in these economic times, even more so. There in lies the dilemma. If I want to save money, where should I do that? More »

February 8th, 2009 | Category: Brazil, Financial Crisis | Comments (32)

As I have already documented, I sold all of my stocks in May 2008. I feel fortunate, but I know of no one else that has escaped this economic crisis unscathed. The sordid details of the Madoff scandal and the avarice of AIG are just surfacing now. It is riveting how misplaced were our confidences with our financial security. Confucius said “May you live in interesting times.” And this is so very true. I put together these thoughts to help people navigate through these uncertain and interesting times. More »

January 4th, 2009 | Category: Financial Crisis | Comments (2)

This post is called the Double Bubble, because it is clear that there have been two very significant bubbles to ripple through the world in the last 15 years. Just looking at the Dow Jones Industrial average, there is a bubble which begins circa 1995 and bottoms out circa 2003. Immediately after the tech bubble bottoms, a new bubble begins to form, which is the crisis we face today. As has already been discussed in previous blogs, Greenspan intentionally created a second bubble by lowering interest rates after the Tech Bubble popped. More »

December 28th, 2008 | Category: Brazil, Financial Crisis | Leave a comment

We keep on hearing that the current economic crisis is global in nature. That is to say, that each and every country in the world will suffer along with the United States. To be honest, this entire premise seems false to me. Surely there would be winners and losers as this economic crisis unfolds. Plus on top of this, the US is the largest debtor nation in the world. Surely the lenders will survive the crisis better than the debtors.

The chart below takes a peek at the interest rates around the world. The first thing that I notice is that there is a huge spread in interest rates from various countries. Their appears to be high interest rates in countries that are expanding such as China, Russia, India and Brazil. And then the balance of the countries have extremely low interest rates such as Japan, US, Europe and Great Britain. This chart is critical for understanding the economic crisis since artificially low interest rates are the root cause of the bubbles. More »

November 23rd, 2008 | Category: Brazil, Financial Crisis | Leave a comment

One of the greatest travesties to this bubble is the incredible American deficit under the Bush administration. The deficit has ballooned by over $5T in a scant 8 years. We can all agree that this is highly fiscally irresponsible, but the question remains, “Where did all this money go?”

After all, Bush is a Republican, and the funds certainly were not spent on liberal causes such as welfare and education. Given the record price at the gas pump, the funds were not spent on alternative energies, or more energy efficient cars. In fact, I think that we can look back at the success of the Humvee as a unique product of the Bush administration. More »

November 3rd, 2008 | Category: Financial Crisis, Politics | Leave a comment

The media is calling this bubble the worst since the Great Depression. That sure sounds scary, but where are the facts? What makes them believe this bubble is so severe relative to other bubbles? Are there any facts to feed the panic or just pure fear?

I decided to take a look at some of the facts to measure the bubble and finally set some expectations about the size of the bubble. First I looked at the average housing pricing for the last 45 years. I pulled all of the information from www.census.gov which is a terrific place to gather macro economic information. More »

October 27th, 2008 | Category: Financial Crisis, Politics | Comments (1)

Yesterday, the House of Representatives approved the $700B bailout plan, and President Bush quickly signed it into law. Sigh! What I dislike most about this bill was that everyone including the President was acting in a panic. No one was calmly analyzing the underlying magnitude of the credit crisis, and the fundamentals that would drive our great country so close to the edge of a cliff. I’ll try to do that here.

The first chart is a simple graph of the trend of our national debt. Bush inherited a $5.7T debt, and by the end of his presidency, it will most likely exceed $11T. In a short eight years, Bush and the Republicans have doubled the size of the deficit. Let’s put this another way. Bush created a deficit in eiqht years equal to all 42 presidents before him COMBINED. There are only two ways to create a disaster of this magnitude. More »

October 6th, 2008 | Category: Financial Crisis, Politics | Comments (1)