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	What's New (as of August 2004) New Feature Articles My article on "transit villages" in the S.F. Chronicle Sunday Magazine made the cover (guess it was a slow news cycle). I Call the Election--and Why President Bush will lose the coming election, and I say this not as a partisan but simply as someone who knows Americans vote their pocketbooks--and those are slowly but surely becoming thinner. (Background note: I registered Republican in 2000 to vote for the person I felt had the leadership and strength to lead the country, John McCain, and then registered in 2004 as a Democrat to vote for the person I felt was best qualified to extricate the country from Iraq, Wes Clark. Of course neither candidate won their primaries.) The simple truth is that the U.S. economy is on borrowed time, because it's been living on borrowed money-- vast, unimaginably large amounts of money printed into being by the Federal Reserve. (Just look at the growth in M2 Money Supply, if you're into that sort of thing.) This "recovery" is as fake as the "wealth" created when Uncle Louie blows into town and buys Mom a designer dress and Dad a new Ford with credit cards he can't pay. The bill comes due at some point, and the bill for this rampant excess is coming due sooner than most expected. The reasons are somewhat complex-- start with the fact that 60% of this fantastic debt has been funded by the Japanese and Chinese governments buying our low-interest bonds to artificially suppress the value of their currencies--and then go from there. The main thing to know is that it's unraveling. These Non-US institutions aren't buying enough bonds to keep interest rates low, and the post-bubble stock market is deflating--slowly at the moment, but with gathering force as the cost and uncertainty of oil grows. So prepare for five things: John Kerry as President, much higher energy costs, higher inflation, higher interest rates and a fast-melting stock market. If you're in the market, you can still preserve your capital if you sell now. Don't wait a month or until the election--that will be too late. Sell tomorrow, or set stops, and then buy puts on the QQQs if you have the intestinal fortitude to trade options. You heard it first here.... What I did this summer--build a fence.                   A completed section of said fence.                     "What's New: June 2004" "What's New: Feb. 2004" "What's New: Jan. 2004" "What's New: Sept./Oct. 2003" "What's New: July/Aug. 2003" "What's New: June 2003" "What's New: May 2003" "What's New: April 2003" "What's New: March 2003" "What's New: February 2003"