One great thing about a bubble economy that promotes infantile attachments is that you never have to grow up and fully assume adult responsibility. Once again, I do not make this stuff up – I only report on the madness of crowds that is the result of people buying into the bubble-inflationary economy that feeds the masses a sense [...]

This topic just won’t go away. It’s not my fault – really! A Detroit-area company, Just Baked, is going to expand. It is taking its cupcakes to the rest of the nation. As we know, this is a wonderful time for a cupcake bubble. Here is a snippet from another article on the topic: The [...]

This is a good paper by J. Richard Anderson of Stonehill College from the Journal of Business Studies. Krispy Kreme is indeed a great case study for finance-business geeks who are baffled by extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds. Here is the abstract (yes, there is a typo): The recent decline of Krispy Kreme [...]

One week ago, I blogged “The Height of Boom-Bust Absurdity,” a post about one of my favorite, fun topics: the cupcake craze. Or cupcake bubble. Or cupcake Idiocracy. Or Rinse & Repeat. Whatever you want to call it. For the sake of background, I will re-post it below: —————————– Cupcakes have been a favorite target [...]

Cupcakes have been a favorite target on this blog for a few years. Why? Because cupcakes “filled with white butter cream, topped with half vanilla cream cheese frosting mixed with chocolate chip cookie crumbs and half chocolate fudge mixed with brownie pieces and covered with chocolate chip cookie and brownie pieces” are one of the [...]

If this doesn’t make you cry …. Skip Oliva alerted me to this site called perpetualkid.com, a website for parents of children and grown-up children who are ageless consumers of the campaign to keep Americans dumbed down and happily engaged in bread and circuses. Here you can unleash your inner detective or old west bandit [...]

Yahoo Finance has published a good article on the student loan bubble-go-bust. Here’s an eye-opening snippet: Secondly, defaults have soared amid a difficult job market. In 2008, the most recent year for which data are available, nearly 3.4 million borrowers began repayment, and more than 238,000 defaulted on their loans. The number of loans that [...]

Since very few libertarians take it upon themselves to post on this topic, here are some miscellaneous postings. Skip Oliva has some comments on the libertarian reaction to calling out Boobus. My fellow traveler Karen DeCoster is never shy about criticizing the wasteful consumption habits of others. In response to a post from Lew Rockwell on [...]

Lew Rockwell posted this email from me on LewRockwell.com following our discussion of the responses I was getting for posting about the Fed-fueled hyper-consumerism madness on his blog, as well as my own blog (and Facebook). The responses I received from tunnel-vision libertarians were pretty pathetic (as well as crazed, using very foul language). Here’s [...]

I reported on a foolish new bubble-driven, infantile fad yesterday – the yogurt taps for adults. Today I have seen the worst case, ever, of a bubble-driven, adolescent, mindless fixation as reported this past weekend in the New York Times (hat tip goes to Lew Rockwell for this one). This particular new business, in Times [...]