Bill Bonner's Diary

Cometh the hour, cometh the man. Or the woman… The White House is casting about for a new Fed chairman. Three candidates have their mouths open, hoping to snag the hook: Janet Yellen, Larry Summers and Don Kohn.

Another day of piddly trading, with piddly losses for both stocks and gold. So let’s turn back to our thoughts. First, we looked at money. We saw that the US now operates on a type of money better suited to the Paleolithic Age. A credit-backed money system has never worked in the modern world… and none has ever survived...

When we left you yesterday we were lamenting how the American working classes have lost ground. Today, the typical working stiff has a lower real income than he had in 1950. Wait… Is that possible? Yes. As we showed yesterday, he has to work longer today to pay for a family car and a house than did six decades ago. In...

Amazing how much difference a few years make. We first visited China in the 1980s. It was an appalling dump. Few cars. Few roads. Almost no decent restaurants or hotels. Now in Beijing you see large black luxury automobiles everywhere… and modern highways crisscrossing in front of huge hotels and apartment buildings.

Dear Diary Reader, Dad is in Beijing at the Chinese launch of his new book on family wealth, Family Fortunes. So instead of his regular diary entry today, here’s another classic for you. It’s about a “forgotten” president who was the last to deal honestly with a financial crisis.

Whew! We spent most of last week on airplanes. From Paris to Amsterdam… then to Vancouver… then to Beijing… and finally back to Paris. The best flight was Air Canada from Vancouver to Beijing. The plane was almost empty. We got on… put the seat back… and went to sleep.

The lazy days of summer trading continue. The Dow barely moved yesterday. Gold fell $15 an ounce – to be expected after the recent big move up. We left Vancouver, where we were giving a speech at the Agora Financial Investment Symposium, only a few hours after getting there. On the airplane to Beijing we puzzled about time and place...