John T. Reed’s news blog

This was written in response to a question from one of my Facebook readers.My house is 3,400 square feet, .36% of an acre lot, five bedrooms, office, 3-car garage. $2.643 M value. 29 miles east of San Francisco..Many ordinary people are eager to get sums like $4M or 5M or more, and sort of assume that would be great and everyone knows it. No, it is more money than a person can spend on ordinary wants and needs. If you suffer a financial disaster like your first son gets admitted to an Ivy League college, (been there, done that in...

On the subject of high inflation, I tell readers what I think is the way to protect yourself. Most other writers pontificate as if they were the president’s top economic advisors telling him how to use his power to prevent or fix hyperinflation. A waste of time given that politicians are not interested in doing the right thing. . So I was surprised to see that Steve Forbes’ Inflation book has a chapter titled ‘What about your money?” It supposedly tells you how to “preserve and even grow your assets.” . Great! Only I did not find it very useful....

I never see an American Hamas supporter interviewed on TV, so I am not sure what their real motive is. . However, I was in college—true it was West Point, not a big protest campus—during the Vietnam war. . After the war ended, one of the Chicago Seven, Abbie Hoffman I think, admitted that the whole Vietnam war protest was not about the morality of the war, as they screamed. Rather, he said the whole thing was just about parent baiting. In other words, the college kids were just trying to outrage the maximum number of grown-ups as much as...

The Judge in the Trump case said the bond posted by Trump was not good enough because it could go down in value during the trial. . The bond is secured by $175,000,000 in cash that Trump put into a Schwab account controlled by the bond company. The amount of the bond ordered by the Court is $175,000,000. The bond is 100% secured by cash. . The judge thinks cash US dollars may fall in value!!?? The purchasing power may fall due to inflation. But that is not taken into account for bond posting purposes.. Hopefully the Jury is more...

Steve Forbes book says there cannot ever be inflation if there is a gold standard. . Well, there actually was gold inflation after America was discovered. The conquistadors found lots of gold and brought it back to Europe. That jump in the supply of gold caused temporary inflation I believe. . Minor sidelight: At times in recent hyperinflation, people have used bricks, cigarettes and chocolate as money—the latter two in Germany in 1945. Bricks were used in the shattered USSR. . I have not read a book on inflation in years. Reading this one scared me more and I was...