I’ve been away speaking at Commonwealth conferences for the past 10 days, which were (as usual) a tremendous amount of fun. I even had the chance to take my parents to the last one, in Naples, Florida. They found—and I rediscovered—that there’s no nicer group of people than Commonwealth advisors and staff. I’m tremendously grateful for the opportunity to hang out with these folks, and to show my parents my world.

Every so often, you read something that makes so much sense you wonder why you didn’t write it yourself. Recently, I have run into a couple of articles I wish I had written, and I’d like to highlight them with some additional thoughts.

One of the things I try to keep in mind is the possibility I might be wrong. (Hard to believe, I know, but stranger things have happened.)

Although I remain convinced the economy will continue to grow—and that weather and other transitory factors contributed to the lackluster first quarter—the continuing stream of weak economic reports at least suggests the opposite is also possible.

Today seems like a good time to pull out the wayback machine again, for a look at commodity and oil prices. I’ve focused quite a bit on oil prices here, and what they might mean for the U.S. economy, but other commodities are also important.

I read a transcript this week of a talk given by legendary investor Stan Druckenmiller, which has a tremendous amount of good stuff in it. (You can find it here.)

I was particularly struck by Druckenmiller’s comment, on page 31, that the current economic and market situation feels bad, much as it did for him in 2004. When you hear this kind of statement from someone with his record, it’s worth considering what might happen if he’s right.

Lately, I've been reading that the housing market, having largely recovered from the financial crisis, is now set to stay dormant. Much of this argument seems to be based on the last couple of months, when housing has indeed been hibernating.

But I suspect we haven’t seen the end of the housing boom.

After yesterday’s discussion of the Greek crisis, I thought we should take a look at the other major international risk: China. I haven’t written a lot about China recently, as there hasn’t been much news, but some recent developments warrant an update.

Whenever the market drops, I get calls asking me to explain why. There’s no short answer, of course, but today is an interesting time to look at short-term market behavior and try to understand what makes it tick.

Yesterday’s post on jobs made some interesting points about the relative performance of the economy today and in previous decades, highlighting both strengths and weaknesses of the current recovery.

A look at financial figures over the same time periods offers a different but equally interesting set of observations.

Given some of the comparisons I’ve made lately between the 1990s, 2000s, and today, I thought it would be enlightening to look at various data points from different time periods to see how they stack up. After starting to compile the information, though, I realized that there are a lot of interesting comparisons to be drawn, enough to make this a series.