The Big Theoretical Bugaboo

" ...Let me ask you; if 51 things were going up in price by a buck each, and 49 things were going down in price by a buck each, would that be "inflation"? And, since you found that one so easy, let me also ask you this question; if 51 things were going down by a buck and 49 were going up by a buck, would that be "deflation"? Now we get to the big theoretical bugaboo; if the price of a share of stock goes down by 50% and the price of a loaf of bread goes up by 49%, which is it? Inflation or deflation? Well, if you could eat the shares of stock, then, ummm. Hey! Wait a minute here! This sounds like an idea worthy of a Nobel Prize!..."

I see that you are getting pretty grown up now, and are old enough to learn a couple of unpleasant things. For one, your mother is a lesbian and the other is that the Treasury has now issued $643 billion in new debt in the last twelve months. I was just joking about your mom, and the lesson there is that just because she puts poison in my food does not mean that she hates all men, or that she has an affection for other women. The lesson in the other matter is that although the Treasury has issued so damn much debt, it doesn't make any difference whether or not your mom is a lesbian, because we are all being financially murdered, and Death doesn't care what your gender preferences are.

Foreign central banks, presumably mostly the Japanese, keep stepping heroically up to the plate and are consuming our debt by the dumpster load. Last week's tally: another ten billion buck's worth, bringing their total haul to $943 billion. I still laugh when I think back to the days when people thought the Japanese were so smart and that we had something to learn from them.

The good news is that we now have a test to probe for the heartbreak of Intellectual Economic Insufficiency, known as IEI. And the test is simplicity itself. All you have to do is listen, and if you hear a person endorsing the idea of a world fiat currency, then you know that this person suffers from Intellectual Economic Insufficiency.

These poor, afflicted people deserve our pity, and so I beg you to please try and restrain your instinctual response of trying to slap some sense into their hard heads or track them down with a .30-.30 deer rifle. They need help. They deserve to be belittled and cursed at, but they need, as I said, pity.

And I am, by no means, the only guy who thinks so. Rick Ackerman, who is one of those economist pundit guys who probably also hobnobs with Hollywood starlets and educated literati, and is respected by people who know him and therefore he has no idea what it is like to be me, writes, "But this is not a textbook deflation; rather, it is like no other deflation that has occurred before in human history, since it will be the first to emerge atop a global currency system that has been hollowed to the core."

Kurt Richebächer, noted Austrian-school big-brained economist, writes, "In 2002, total credit expanded in the United States by $2,286 billion, of which $1,363.7 billion was nonfinancial, and $922.4 billion financial credit. This compared with net national savings of $286.7 billion."

I see these things and steam hisses comically out of my ears, and yet when I look out the window, I am amazed that the world is not erupting in flames! So there is one good thing that has emerged from the incompetence of the education establishment; the common man is, so far, ignorant of what is going to happen to him.

Gerard Jackson, who is the Economics Editor at Brookes, writes, "The tragedy is that though the creeping inflation case has been thoroughly discredited by economic history and sound economic theory it is still being successfully propounded as a responsible economic policy."

This bit of lunacy is consistent with Henry Hazlitt's maxim that the course of all inflation and the associated disasters proceeds along the same delusional lines. And one of these delusions is that exponentially growing debt is somehow not dangerous. Oh, everyone admits that in the old days, namely every period of time in all of history until now, gigantic debts and deficit-spending always ended badly. But somehow things are different now. For one thing, we have rap music.

James Grant, of the eponymous Grant's Interest Rate Observer, is one of those really bright guys that you figure must have something very wrong with them if they are devoting so much of their brain-horsepower to economics instead of handicapping college sports. Note that his newsletter is about interest rates, so you would suspect that he must be a pretty clued-in guy about things like, well, for instance, interest rates.

So why in the hell are people crushing little babies underfoot in their mad stampede to lock in the lowest interest rates in almost fifty freaking years? He says, "The deflation alarms have caused savers to climb stepladders to reach for yield in the upper branches of barren trees." The Daily Reckoning editors have taken Mr. Grant's metaphors and applied it to, "GM's rotting balance sheet may be one of the most barren trees on the fixed-income landscape. The express purpose of the automaker's titanic $17 billion bond offering - the largest ever by an American corporation - is to shift liabilities from one corner of its balance sheet to another corner."

This brings up the additional news that insiders are big sellers. Vickers Weekly Insider looks at the 8-week moving average of insider sales compared to purchases, and they find that insider selling is swamping insider buying, and it is running at 4.11 to 1. Other, like Martin Weiss over at the Safe Money Report figure that the ratio could actually be as high as 275 to 1. The Daily Reckoning people, knowing that I would not get off my lazy butt to do any digging at all, combed through the data and found that "The last time the ratio was over 4 was in May of last year - just before the Dow fell from 10,353 to 7,286."

And remember that it is these insider fellas that decide how to do the accounting, how to do the reporting, how to milk the company for outlandishly generous pay and benefit packages, how to steal all my ideas and not pay me a dime, which I admit is a big fat lie since I have never come up with anything original in my life, so obviously they never stole anything from me but my pride, as when they send my contributions back to me with a note addresses to my mommy asking her to monitor my activities more closely and to seek professional help for me before I grow up and start going to school. But if I ever DID come up with something then I am sure that these grubby, lying, all-American CEO weenies and their filthy pals would rip me off in a heartbeat. And while these accounting and reporting tricks may be very successful in duping you into thinking everything is fine and dandy and wonderful and that this is definitely one of the few stocks that you should immediately buy, and buy some more shares every day for the rest of your life irrespective of the price, there is one group of people that is NOT fooled in the least by this crap: the insiders. And they are selling.

And, even though these guys are too polite to say it, the problem is getting worse every day. And while they are too refined to engage in trash-talking, I am under thrall of no such niceties, and characteristically leap to my feet to say that this conglomeration of corporate bozos has admitted that they cannot pay their bills now, at the end of the longest boom in history when prices were rising the whole freaking time, but now you think that they will be able to pay their bills tomorrow, plus the new burden of another $17 billion in debt, while sales are falling, and their debt has been downgraded?

I scream! Oh, not at this bit of news, but at the sudden realization that these people are lunatics, and that there are no more lunatic asylums into which to incarcerate them, which means they are out here on the streets.

Rick Ackerman, referred to previously, also had a pithy quote about gold. "Gold is the no-brainer investment of our lifetime. As far as I can recall, it is unprecedented that the escape route from a severe economic downturn should be so cheap, so obvious, and so essentially risk-less."

And to all the dunderheads who are NOT buying gold, let me advise you not to have children. Or if you already have had children, get them sterilized immediately, so as to protect the gene pool. Mr. Ackerman has succinctly points out that the case for gold is so obvious that its obviousnessivity is off-the-charts, its cheapness on the old cheapnessosity-meter is past red-line, and the risk-reward profile is so skewed that the probability of risk, which I now label "riskivity," is essentially zero. And yet people are NOT buying gold?

Perhaps Mr. Ackerman and I are both right. He thinks that the investment is a no-brainer. I say that to NOT buy gold indicates that you have no brains. Now, all I have to do is prove that the brains of those people have been removed by alien creatures who are intent on destroying our world, and they plan to do that by first causing an economic failure and system-wide devastation.

To be sure, this was sort of a script from Star Trek, where some energy-force creature survived by consuming the energy of fear and anger. The creature thus sowed the seeds of anger and animosity among the crew of the starship Enterprise, which, I might add, also had a lot of alien visitors on board, namely Klingons

Judge Milton Pollack ruled in favor of Merrill Lynch and against a group of investors who lost their investment butts and bucks. The judge's ruling was not that Merrill's analysts were group of lying whores, or that lying whores like Merrill are allowed to cheat people. No, the ruling was that the investors had willingly ignored the obvious fact that these people WERE lying whores, because it was in all the newspapers and magazines and on the news every day for the last few decades. So to rely on the advice of lying whores was stupid in spades.

The judge decided that the plaintiffs had "hoped to twist federal securities laws into a scheme of cost-free speculator's insurance." And why not? Hell, every other law has been twisted into some scheme of cost-free insurance against something, so that government now sees it as its duty to bail people out of the consequences of their own stupidities.

But these analysts are all paid by somebody, and their advice is used by brokers to convince a wide spectrum of people that it is prudent to buy grossly overvalued stocks, and especially stocks that are getting more overvalued with each tick of the clock, which rhymes with "stocks" so there is a certain poetry in there And people who bought those worthless stocks on the advice of brokers, who were relying on information supplied by the selfsame lying analysts, WILL be able to sue successfully.

So you can see why judge Pollack's ruling is destined to be overturned on appeal; it goes against the very nature of Americans and the sick "everything has a safety net" society we have created for ourselves, and to give a "get out of jail free" card to lying whores is preposterous and un-American. You can see why this trend-breaking precedent cannot be allowed to stand.

Bill Bonner, also of the Daily Reckoning staff, took time away from his daily mediations to traipse down the path of the mundane, grubby world of dollars and cents to calculate that, "Thanks to the Bush tax cuts, a single guy making $50,000 per year will take home another $8."

Not being a single guy, I, of course, say "Screw single guys! What's in it for ME?" Not being a Medicare recipient either, I say "Screw the prescription drug benefit! What's in it for ME?" And since I have no children with which to extract free money from the government in this new round of tax rebates, I say "Screw the children! What is in it for ME?" The ugly truth is that the only thing in it for me is to pay more to the government, and higher prices for everything else.

But the larger question is, "$8 per what unit of time?" If it is eight bucks a year, then the stimulus is indeed small. If it is eight bucks a week, well, it's better than nothing. If it is eight bucks a day, then we are talking a nice little piece of change. If we are talking eight bucks an hour, then we are suddenly talking about some nice pile of moolah here dude! And if we are talking eight bucks a minute, then man, oh man, this is going to be sweet!

And that, of course, leads us directly to my latest and greatest bid for a Nobel Prize in economics. In this highly original theory, all of our economic problems could be solved by merely altering what we call "units of time." And since Einstein proved that time is a relative concept, we already have the Laws of Physics going for us.

To explain this theoretical breakthrough, let me use an example. If you used to make twenty thousand a year, then simply change "year to "month." Suddenly, you are making twenty grand A MONTH! And there are all kinds of people whose problems would be immediately solved with that kind of financial infusion! Me, for example!

And the best part is that it is also scalable, just like the Fed does in scaling up its monetary excesses! So, therefore, if changing your monthly income is still insufficient, then all you have to do is change "a decade's worth of income" to "yearly income!"

Now, if you would like to pursue this fascinating new theory, feel free. Of course, I will insist that you reference me, spell my name correctly, and recommend that I be revered as a living god. Strewing rose petals in my path is a nice touch, but baking up a pan of brownies for me is more along the lines I was thinking. But, in order to avoid any unnecessary duplication of effort, please note that I am taking my tranche of the research grant money to investigate the analytical path that uses chocolate donut consumption as the dependent variable. And pornographic literature, too. Two dependent variables. And maybe expensive sports cars. So, three dependent variables; chocolate donuts, porn and hot cars. And if you have ever tried to solve anything with three dependent variables, then you may or may not know that I am going to need a lot of research money, and for a long, long period of time, and maybe you would like to send me a few bucks to keep this thing fully funded until that grant money starts rolling in. Thanks.

Martin Weiss also reports that "Life and Health Insurer's Profits Decline 53% in 2002." So they make less money, so they make less profit, so that is why they need to raise premiums, and why they have to invest their money in the crappiest, lowest-yielding, over-valued and thus over-risky environment in the last fifty years at the same freaking time. So no matter how lousy your stinking life is, it could be worse. You could be an insurance company.

In case you are keeping score, this is just another of the wonderful effects of the utter failure of the Federal Reserve system in practice, although it looked great on paper. And it is just another by-product in the chronicle of the unbelievable, catastrophic failure of Alan Greenspan, the worst Fed Chairman in the history of the Fed, who is making everyone jump through all of these hoops to bail himself out.

And if you don't think so, just look around you! Against the sheer tonnage of the losses in wealth, inflations, bubbles, rising unemployment, rising taxes, absence of savings, etc. what is there good to say about the man and his horrible policies? That he temporarily kept everything from falling to actual worthlessness for another few years by rabidly pursuing a highly inflationary, credit-fueled, consumption-fueled, debt-fueled idiocy? My God!

And then one only has to remember that he was made a Knight by the British, which is akin to a colony of rats giving one of the other rats a crown to wear. And I gotta say that this little simile may be a new low for me, as far as dishing out heaping scoops of disrespect. And in case there is some prize for Most Disrespectful Essay, and in case you are connected in some way with that prize, then I hope you will think of me. But when Britain passes laws that make it illegal for people to defend themselves against murderers, rapists and robbers, it is unworthy of any respect whatsoever. In that regard, Canada is going down that same stupid path, as ludicrous as that sounds.

Fortunately, this irresponsible and repugnant philosophy was never in vogue anywhere, at any other time in human history. Otherwise, movies would not be the same. We see our beautiful schoolmarm Tess calling to John Wayne, "Help! The outlaws are attacking! They've killed my pa, and they've killed my ma, and now they're a-fixing to kill me, too!" In those golden-olden days, John, being the manly man he was, would have drawn his trusty six-shooter, killed all the bad guys, saving not only the lovely Tess, but also all the other ranchers who would have been next. He was a hero.

Today, in Britain and in Canada, the plot would be completely different. Today our hero must reply, "Can't help you ma'am. But I'll ride into town and notify the sheriff that you are dead. Have a nice day!"

At least we can console ourselves that we do not live in Europe and are paid in dollars. This cohort has had the purchasing power of their paychecks diminished by 20% in the last year, and by about 50% in the last two years. So, even if they continue to spend 100% of their income, they get 20% less stuff, and the local merchants are finding that, in the last year, the fraction of their revenues from selling stuff to Americans has been diminished by 20%, too.

The long list of people that I laugh at in disrespect is growing smaller, now that California has revealed that they are sick and tired of Gray Davis and that load of corrupt Leftist jackasses. Of course, Californians delayed making that judgment until after the execrable Mr. Davis and the loathsome philosophies of the Left have predictably bankrupted the whole state while simultaneously taking over all the local governments in the state, so that everybody up and down the line is in trouble.

Switzerland has finally come out and admitted that they are now also on the big bandwagon to destroy their own currency. I had been watching the sizzling growth of the momentary aggregates in Switzerland for a couple of months with interest, but who knows, eh? But now all of that watching and wondering are over, at last. They have always hitched their currency wagon to gold, and now their currency is as strong as steel.

Let me ask you; if 51 things were going up in price by a buck each, and 49 things were going down in price by a buck each, would that be "inflation"? And, since you found that one so easy, let me also ask you this question; if 51 things were going down by a buck and 49 were going up by a buck, would that be "deflation"?

The reason I asked you such stupid questions is that Eric Weiss, the investing-whiz-bang hotshot behind the eponymous Martin Weiss' Safe Money Report, had a reader write in and ask the same question that everyone else seems to be wrestling with. Namely, "It seems all the printing of dollars and the devaluation of the dollar will cause inflation. How could we have deflation at the same time?"

Mr. Weiss defines inflation as "Falling prices, incomes and wealth," which seems as good as any. So stocks that are reverting to some faint semblance of real value, after being inflated to their current, preposterously overvalued prices, is now defined as deflation. But the converse, the stunning run-up in price, was not inflation! A big, huge, decade-long run-up in price to historically ludicrous P/E's was not inflation, and certainly not an inflation that the Fed and banking system needed to do anything about. But when the prices go back down a little, then that is something they get their knickers all twisted into a knot about! Wow!

But beyond that, let me soothe your fevered brow, as you are still perplexed about why I had posed that whole 51 things and that 49 things thing. With a smug smile, I answer by asking you to consider the price of wheat. Right now, wheat is about three bucks a bushel. If some Chinese guy wants a bushel of wheat, it will cost him, with some simplifying assumptions, 25.5 yuan, or, three bucks converted at 8.5 yuan to the dollar, the current pegged rate. And if you, as an American person, want a bushel of wheat, that'll just be three bucks, and would you like some fries with that?

Now suppose that all the printing of dollars and the devaluation of the dollar is made manifest by the Chinese un-pegging their currency from the dollar and allowing the yuan to float. Theoretically, the dollar will plummet as the yuan soars.

Now, if the dollar loses 50% of its value overnight against the yuan, which doesn't seem that preposterous anymore, then how much does that bushel of wheat, priced in US dollars, now cost the Chinese importer? I'll give you the answer to save you the trouble of getting out the calculator and randomly pressing buttons and then getting frustrated and finally cursing and throwing the damn thing in the garbage and then your wife will come and see what all the fuss is about and get it out of the garbage and yell at you about do you know how much these things cost and just because you are an idiot that can't work an ordinary calculator does not mean that you have the right to abuse and waste a fine piece of calculating machinery like this and then she puts it back on the desk and then you have to sit there glowering at it all afternoon, and the answer is it will cost $1.50 a bushel. Or 12.75 yuan. Which is a hell of a sale, compared to prices which were 100% higher than that last week!

Suddenly, thanks to the devalued dollar, the United States is a low-priced producer of wheat! At the exact same time, the price of foreign-grown Chinese wheat skyrockets by 100%. Chinese purchases of our wheat goes up, and our purchases of Chinese-grown wheat go down, making the domestic demand for American wheat go up, too, adding to the pressures caused by increased sales to foreign buyers.

Now that we have seen just one lousy example of the changes wrought by a devalued dollar, namely price inflation in the cost of food, let's move over to the oil pits and take a look at the latest estimates of how long OPEC will remain so stupid that they don't even raise the price per barrel of oil when they are paid in a currency, namely the dollar, that is steadily, as in day after day, week after week, month after month, screwing them out of buying power.

Hmmm. If we are using a linear extrapolation method, which is the only kind we like to use here in America, then the graph shows that OPEC will never get smart, since they have so steadfastly remained at this low level of comprehension for a quite a long time now.

Anyway, the point is that we can have deflation in the price of stocks, bonds and houses and incomes, all the things that Mr. Weiss mentioned, but the inflation in the price of government and commodities will go up, giving you deflation and inflation at the same time. In the past, when this ugly scenario reared its head, it was called "stagflation."

Now we get to the big theoretical bugaboo; if the price of a share of stock goes down by 50% and the price of a loaf of bread goes up by 49%, which is it? Inflation or deflation? Well, if you could eat the shares of stock, then, ummm. Hey! Wait a minute here! This sounds like an idea worthy of a Nobel Prize!

Noting that health insurance premiums are again likely to hit price increases that run around 17% next year, Doug Nolan quotes one guy who says that, "The estimates do not take into account changes in benefit plans aimed at cutting costs." Hahaha! Cutting costs! Hahaha! Like, somehow in the health and medical industry, it is possible to cut costs without a reduction in benefits, thus somehow producing something for nothing! Man, this is too, too rich! It's like the Fed was in charge of health care! Something for nothing! Man, this is great stuff!

And let's not forget that "costs" that can be cut, but that money is also somebody else's income, and who has a family to be fed and a couple of new jet skis that need to be paid for and this big new mortgage. And a big, new SUV in the driveway, which needs to be washed.

So, we have premiums increasing by 17%, benefits going down, aggregate income staying constant, but being directed to fewer and fewer recipients. One day, finally, there will be but two costs: government taxes and health insurance premiums.

There are ugly rumors going around that the productivity miracle, the one that makes Alan Greenspan break into toothy smiles, is all a hoax. After totting up the gains and losses in the world of jobs, Doug Noland asks "Total Government jobs are now almost 50% larger than Manufacturing. Is it reasonable to trumpet a 'productivity revolution' when the vast majority of new jobs and attendant "output" emanate from Credit intermediation, healthcare, leisure and government?"

My answer is, of course, not only "no," but "No, no, a thousand times no! You cannot build an economy on services, because if you could, then everyone would do it! To the freaking contrary, you can only have an economy when you make stuff that other people want to buy!"

Bill Fleckenstein, of Fleckenstein Capital, writes, "Meanwhile, to judge by the lopsided sentiment readings, most people are counting on a continued party in stocks. Given the problems that we face on any number of fronts, I regard this bullishness as completely mind-boggling."

Imagine that you take your car in to be fixed , and the mechanic is a graduate of the Alan Greenspan School of Fixing Stuff. You have taken the car into be fixed several times before, and each time he has installed a new carburetor, but the car doesn't ever seem to get running right.

The mechanic, whose name is also Alan, says, "Yep, you need another new carburetor. A bigger one." And you say, "But a friend says that two of the pistons have disintegrated!" Alan says, "Yep, and that is why we need a new, bigger carburetor; to make the other pistons work harder and be more productive. You heard about productivity, right?"

You add, trying to be helpful, "But there seems to be an electrical fire in the ignition system, too!" Alan leans over the engine and says "Yep, there's a fire in the wiring of that back cylinder there! That'll probably soon conk out another cylinder, so you are going to need an even BIGGER carburetor to make the surviving cylinders even MORE productive!"

Trying to impress him with your automotive know-how, you volunteer that the carburetor is now so large, and so ineffective, that you are getting two miles per gallon. Alan knits his brows together, and opines "Yep. And that's why you need a bigger carburetor. That'll make the engine more productive, and you will save gas in the long run."

"Well, this bigger carburetor I'm going to put on your car will make your engine so productive that you can easily drive on just the rims, and that will save you the expense of buying new tires!"

In exasperation you exclaim "I can't afford any more carburetors! I have already maxed out my credit card paying for the other carburetors you've installed!"

Alan says, "No problem! I have a printing press in the back room, so I'll just print up some money so that I can loan it to you at 1% interest! And with the added productivity on your car, you will be more productive too, and then GDP will expand, and the additional income you receive will pay for the new carburetor, and the community will be much better off, too!"

Bush is so obsessed with the desire to be re-elected, and the members of Congress are so similarly obsessed, that they are now sending out, literally, free money to people. Well, not all people, but only those who have children. And not all those who have children, but those people who have children and who also work and have paid income taxes.

But the good news is that there are an increasing number of people who are taking a good, hard look at prices and how the government calculates inflation, and are speaking up that the damn government is a lying bunch of weasels about, among many, many other things, price inflation.

To be sure, Alan and the rest of his brain-dead buddies all deride inflation as tame, non-existent, or some other calming euphemism. They are wrong. Otherwise, why the largess of suddenly sending people money?

Mr. Duisenberg is steadfast in not going down that free-money route. Noting that price inflation is reaching the limits of what is acceptable, and that Euro-land budget deficits are now over the Maastrict limits of 3%, has declared that, quoting a piece in the WSJ, "The ECB says it can best foster economic growth by keeping inflation low, aiming for annual inflation of just under 2%." Well, hooray for Mr. Duisenberg and the Europeans who put this guy in charge, because he is exactly right.

And speaking of somebody being exactly right, this is the exact opposite of what the Fed is saying, and that makes the Fed exactly wrong. And the fact is that what the Fed is saying is also the exact opposite of what Austrian economics says, and the Fed is saying the exact opposite of the entire corpus of economics, through all of time and space, until the Americans took over the joint and forced their bastard theories down everyone's throats. And that is why I gotta go with Duisenberg.

Keep On Believin'

So what is causing the big dead-cat bounce in the market? Well, it used to be that since interest rates were so absurdly low, then there was some rational argument that P/E's could be absurdly high, too. But now that rates are inching back upwards, and so are share prices, then that whole rationale seems to be just another Wall Street lie, designed to get me to buy overvalued stocks.

Christopher Wiles, who is a portfolio manager at Strong Capital Management, says that there is some un-quantifiable perception that things will get better and better, and that one day everything will be perfect. As a caveat, he adds, "That isn't justified yet in the economic numbers, but that seems to be what the market is grasping for. There is a willingness to believe right now."

So it may be a faith thing. But not being willing to believe in things like that, as I remember vividly what happened when I believed that Santa Claus was going to bring me all the things I wanted, especially that spiffy new red bicycle with the longhorn handlebars and horn beep beep, I have to fall back on what has happened every other time in all of history where massively excessive debt was accumulated, and especially those who had a fiat currency that the government was printing up willy-nilly. Those who believed in such stupidity got slaughtered.

Always. So will faith triumph over what historically appears to be a 100% certainty? Keep believing, keep that stocking hung by the chimney with care, and see what Santa puts in it. Ugh.

Mogambo Sez: Martin Weiss, in the banner headline of one of his mailings, asks, "If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, then we must ask the question, is Alan Greenspan certifiably insane? His 12 interest rate cuts didn't end the bear market or kick-start the economy... and yet he thinks the 13 th will magically do the trick."

Well, I say that somebody is insane; either Greenspan for thinking it, or Americans for believing it. And I haven't heard anything about Alan Greenspan loading up his portfolio with shares.

Richard Daughty is general partner and C.O.O. for Smith Consultant Group, serving the financial and medical communities, and the writer/publisher of the Mogambo Guru economic newsletter, an avocational exercise the better to heap disrespect on those who desperately deserve it. The Mogambo Guru is quoted frequently in Barron's ,The Daily Reckoning , and other fine publications.