Image by Carlos Lincoln from Pixabay Central banks endlessly fascinate me. The more I research them the more contradictions I find, particularly since their missions and impacts changed over time. Take the Federal Reserve (Fed), for example. It was originally created to countercyclically balance volatile market forces in times of stress. However, the evolution of..
Image by Dinh Khoi Nguyen from Pixabay Inflation is one of the most important, debated, and controversial investment themes today. It’s impacting every asset class from fixed income to commodities to equities. Yet, inflation’s widely misunderstood. While well-known among layman and expert alike, inflation’s definition changed over time. However, not everyone has noticed. As inflation’s..
Image by Jose Antonio Alba from Pixabay So far, my 2023 investing looks just like 2022: lots of waiting. I’m not waiting for a recession to pass or for GDP to improve. I’m not waiting for a certain employment report or for corporate earnings to change. I’m not waiting for the Consumer Price Index (CPI)..
Image by 14995841 from Pixabay Note from the author: I use the terms stability and instability throughout this article. However, resiliency and fragility, respectively, more accurately describe the phenomena that I’m describing. Centralization creates fragility and decentralization creates resiliency. Please note this as you read the article below which I left in its original form…
Image by bridgesward from Pixabay Everyone loves to dunk on the Federal Reserve (Fed). To many, the setters of U.S. monetary policy never get it right. Its stable of Ph.D. economists are always too late, or too slow, or too early, or too fast. Shockingly, many have built prominent careers in peddling this viewpoint. Yet,..
Image by StockSnap from Pixabay As I sat down to write this month’s article, just one topic came to mind: inflation. Readers know that I just wrote on this theme. Yet, it remains topical and I have more to exploring to do. I’m specifically interested in why we’re seeing inflation now and does it even..
Image by Nina Garman from Pixabay Have you heard? There’s trouble in the repo markets. Even casual investment market participants probably know that something’s amiss. While only a handful of investors participate in repo, this obscure corner of the investment markets rests at the epicenter of the financial system—hence all the attention. The turmoil caught..
Image by Annalise Batista from Pixabay I previously postulated that negative interest rates are destructive (though profitable) and that they negate human life on a profoundly fundamental level. If they’re so bad, then how and why do they exist? Well, clearly not everyone sees it my way. My proclamations must be hyperbole, right? Not so..
“Remember that Time is Money.” Benjamin Franklin, Advice to a Young Tradesman It’s unfortunate that such genius identifications as the above have long been forgotten by the economic community. First penned in 1748, Benjamin Franklin makes the connection between human effort—or rather the application of human effort towards productive work—and the effect/product, i.e. wealth. We..
Image by Csaba Nagy from Pixabay The global economy is apparently facing a significant problem. Inflation’s gone missing! Central bankers can’t seem to stoke it no matter how deftly they act. Neither lowering interest rates to zero (and less) nor endless amounts of Quantitative Easing (QE) appear to make any difference. This, we’re told, is..
