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US dollar crash is virtually inevitable says Stephen Roach

Roach is a former Morgan Stanley Asia chairman and is now a senior fellow at Yale University.

  • “The U.S. economy has been afflicted with some significant macro imbalances for a long time, namely a very low domestic savings rate and a chronic current account deficit”
  •  “The dollar is going to fall very, very sharply.”
Roach spoke in an interview with CNBC, called for a 35% fall in the dollar.
  • These problems are going from bad to worse as we blow out the fiscal deficit in the years ahead”
He has further reasons too, here is the link

Jim Rogers: My First Million

jim-rogersSince Jim Rogers, 67, co-founded the Quantum Fund with George Soros he has worked as a guest professor of finance at Columbia University and as an economic commentator. In 1998, he founded the Rogers International Commodities Index (RICI).

Raised in Alabama, Rogers started in business at the age of five, collecting empty soda bottles at the local baseball field. After graduating from Yale University in 1964, he won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford. He then got his first job on Wall Street.

Rogers now lives in Singapore with his wife and their two young daughters.

Did you think you would get to where you are?

No, I am as surprised as anyone. I certainly wanted to get somewhere and was willing to work hard. I wanted to retire young, but I never thought I would retire before 40.

When you realised that you had made your first million were you tempted to slow down?

I can remember the exact day of my first million dollars’ net worth. It was in November 1977. I was 35. I knew I needed more than that to do what I wanted when I was 37 – the age I decided to stop working to seek adventure.

What is the secret of your success? (more…)

Chimpanzees Are Like Stock Traders — They Take Gambles

Humans aren’t the only gamblers in the animal kingdom.

 Our closest primate relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, demonstrate behaviors considered basic to human economics such as delaying gratification and assessing risk, according to new research published Wednesday May 29 in the journal PLoS One.

Though they don’t bet on stock exchanges or casinos, they also have strong emotional reactions to games of chance — like when they are betting on food showing up. They don’t like losing or waiting for payouts, and can even correct their own behaviors based on successes or failures.

“Apes are also experiencing rich emotional reactions in an economic context,” study researcher Alexandra Rosati, of Yale University, said in a statement. “They are making decisions about their most valuable resource, which is food.”

“Even though economists can be quite puzzled about human behavior and what it means, biology suggests that these economic biases have their roots in non-human foraging behaviors,” Rosati said. (more…)