I find the article laughable. I should point out I am a millennial male though, so I would think that. We invest in bitcoin because we are BROKE, and you cannot earn any significant amount by working. And honestly, this entire market proves what we all suspected. Working is for suckers, it will not get you ahead, and money makes [...]
Why are profit margins persistently high? With decent earnings this quarter, corporate profits as a % of GDP will approach (maybe exceed) 10% again. That is abnormally high compared to the period 1960 to 2000. Margins actually started to rise in the mid-80s but really accelerated after 2000 and outside of the 2008 crisis have remained high. Why? What changed in [...]
Immediately after the Fed hiked interest rates last Wednesday – after sitting at 0% for 7 years – markets acted pretty much as one might expect. The Fed tightens monetary policy when the economy is strong so rising stock prices, rising interest rates and a strong dollar are all things that make sense in that context. I am sure there [...]
Transitory: 1. tending to pass away; not persistent 2. of brief duration Transitory is the term the FOMC used to describe the factors that held back the US economy in the 1st quarter. With the GDP report coming earlier in the day the FOMC had no choice but to acknowledge the slowdown but as many seem to be doing, they dismissed [...]
Leverage: the use of credit to enhance one's speculative capacity Merriam-Webster Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world. Archimedes The Swiss National Bank - the Swiss equivalent of our Federal Reserve - didn't exactly move the world last week but the fallout from their surprise change in [...]
So here we are nearly 6 years removed from the last global financial crisis – surely not the last – and while a lot has been done by global economic policymakers, it seems that not much has really been accomplished. Globally, debt has risen since the crisis despite the cries from some quarters of “austerity”; deleveraging is a myth. Even [...]
The Federal Reserve ended QE3 last week as was widely expected and markets seemed to take it calmly enough. Stocks and bonds fluctuated, as they tend to do, but the end result was a non-event. It seemed that investors were willing to give the economy and the markets the benefit of the doubt as we wait to see how things [...]
What is (was?) Quantitative Easing intended to accomplish? Here's what Ben Bernanke said at Jackson Hole when he first proposed the program: The channels through which the Fed’s purchases affect longer-term interest rates and financial conditions more generally have been subject to debate. I see the evidence as most favorable to the view that such purchases work primarily through the [...]
Over the last couple of months I've dedicated a good portion of these weekly commentaries to the various headwinds I see facing the global economy and markets. Everyone, it seems, knows what the risks are and I'm beginning to wonder if, being so well known, the actual events may prove less jarring to sentiment than I've been expecting. There is, [...]
Well, the first quarter is in the books and what a quarter it was for US stocks. The S&P 500 and Russell 2000 both rose 12%, the NASDAQ almost 19% while the Dow lagged the field, up a mere 8%. As for us, while our stock portfolio lagged the S&P 500 slightly for the quarter, our outperformance over the longer [...]
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