CW 425 Declining Marginal Utility with Bill Bonner of Bonner & Partners and Agora Financial - Author of 'Financial Reckoning Day'

On today’s Creating Wealth Show, host Jason Hartman talks to financial maven and author, Bill Bonner, about his new book,Hormegeddon, how to create money out of thin air, the situation in Japan and whether you really can have too much of a good thing. Bill’s company, Agora Financial, is a leading marketplace for advice and talking points about everything to do with investing so he’s perfectly placed to assist those looking to increase their investment prowess.

Ahead of the interview, Jason addresses the Elon Musk announcement of semi-autonomous cars and their inevitably disruptive impact on everything – including real estate.

Takeaways

– The title for Bill Bonner’s latest book, Hormegeddon, comes from the term for specific biological experiments which went awry: hormesis.

– With many of these things they can start out as beneficial but the more you use them, the more issues arise.

– The notion of creating money is so difficult for even experts to understand – how can real money be created from absolutely nothing? From thin air?

– The trade of the decade assessment is not a prediction; it’s all about analysing what’s up and what’s down.

– The situation that Japan is currently in is terrible, and it doesn’t look to be improving in the immediate future.

– Indeed, there’s every possibility that the US could follow suit and end up in a similar situation to Japan, especially with ever-increasing Chinese trade agreements using Chinese currency clauses.

– One potential option could be ‘direct monetary funding’ which is the act of giving money, rather than lending it, in an attempt to bring the economy back up by consumer spending.

– If you borrow money long-term for real estate purposes and it’s on a low-rate basis, inflation can eventually come along and pay off your debt for you.

– Too much of a good thing is only too much. We view security as a good thing, but consider the money the Germans were spending on their own security during the war and that just can’t be justifiable.

– Declining marginal utility is where you invest too much into one thing and it all backfires.

– Decades ago, the huge houses used to be owned by people who made things and had a real role in society and manufacturing; now they’re just owned by hedge-fund guys.

– With all of the technological advances now occurring, this is an amazing time to be alive.

– Agora exists as a marketplace to collect together everyone’s questions and answers about investing because no one knows who’s going to have the right answer.

– For more information, head to www.AgoraFinancial.com or for an entertaining read, check out www.DailyReckoning.com

Tweetables

We spent 200,000 developing our sentiments and our bodies as humans, but now we’re so unequipped to deal with quantitative easing. Tweet this!

Empires get to impose their currency, but over time, they lose that ability – the dollar could seriously fall. Tweet this!