Printing money creates inflation, which weakens an economy. Unfortunately, this kind of common-sense thinking never seems to penetrate academic circles.

Of course if you happen to time the market really well, you can make more money with some of these smaller companies, but for someone with no exposure I wouldn't want to take the risk that they timed it wrong.

Over the past decade or so, you have seen the flip side of that as you've seen stock prices have come down a lot relative to gold. Now you are getting a change where people are more comfortable holding gold because in the rear-view mirror it doesn't look so bad for gold. Bonds have not come down as much relative to gold, but I think the bond bubble is going to burst and will be falling for years too. And gold will look that much better.

The only way to buy more is to produce more.

At some point, the dollar has to give. You can't just keep printing money, and monetizing debt, and buying bonds, without the dollar imploding.

You don't drive an economy by consuming - the consumer is not the engine, the consumer is the caboose.

When private industry makes a mistake, it gets corrected and goes away. As governments make mistakes, it gets bigger, bigger and bigger and they make more, more and more because as they run out of money, they just ask for more and so they get rewarded for making mistakes. In the meantime that is exactly what we are doing by subsidizing companies which are failing, we have a reverse Darwinism, we've got survival of the unfittest, the companies and people that have made terrible mistakes are being rewarded and other people are being punished and being taxed.