The First Time as Tragedy
In the past, our ready predisposition to fear the worst has proven to be well-founded. Indeed, through much of the two years leading up to the Great Crash of 2008, there was all too much evidence to ignore that a kind of collective madness had gripped the whole universe of investment world and had spilled out from thence into every plot of building land and every auction house in the real world.
Amid the relative torpor of the US holiday, it might be the moment to wax a little philosophical and ask if you, the listener, have ever noticed that so much of what passes for economic wisdom today involves the persistent overuse of the word ‘uncertainty’? Continue reading
Pride of place for political news outside the US must go to the UK High Court’s decision that the infamous Article 50 clause by which Brexit is to be achieved cannot take place without being subject to Parliamentary approval. Continue reading
The craziness that is Abenomics seems to have one flimsy foundation: viz., that Japan’s fiscal situation seems so dire as not to be susceptible of a rational approach. Not that this is any real excuse for the political cowardice which attempts to disguise the problem through gross financial and monetary manipulation.
Please click the link for a thorough analysis:- 16-09-29-mmm-sep-jpn
In this complimentary extract from last month’s edition of ‘Money, Macro & Markets‘, that’s the issue at which I take a detailed look. Please follow the link to access the PDF:-
To the superficial observer, October will go down as a time in which nothing much happened, the S&P and the Nikkei basically unchanged on the month and Europe and the UK each off around 1%. Please see below the fold for the rest of Monday’s edition of ‘Two-Minute Markets’ or listen HERE on SoundCloud Continue reading
In the Q&A which followed the latest Federal Reserve exercise in ostrich imitation, Janet Yellen offered up this giant hostage to fortune, if only in the spirit of she-would-say-that-wouldn’t-she:
‘Overall, I would say that the threats to financial stability I would characterize, at this point, as moderate. In general, I would not say that asset valuations are out of line with historical norms.’
Patently, if she has somehow arrived at the determination that there is no indeterminably constituted asset bubble in operation, then it figures that non-bubble asset prices cannot be out of line with their norms. Chalk one up to answering one’s own question in the affirmative.
But how much truth is there in this claim? Not very much at all as you will discover if you click on the following link to read this extract of the latest monthly ‘Money, Macro & Markets‘:
Regular readers will know that the articles published here are but a small subset of the detailed work I undertake to analyse economic and political developments and their effects on markets. In order to give some idea of the scope of this, presented below is an archive of past issues of the Austrian School-informed, in-depth monthly publication, ‘Money, Macro & Markets’ in addition to which I compile twice monthly updates as the ‘Midweek Macro Musings’ which are also made available on a complimentary basis to subscribers to the former letter.
There has been much head-scratching of late as to why, with interest rates lower than they have been since the Universe first exploded out of the Void, businesses are not undertaking any where near as much investment as that hoped for beforehand by the academic cabal whose ‘effective demand’ and ‘transmission channel’ fixations have helped drive rates to today’s mind-boggling levels.
The old Wall St. adage runs that ‘stocks are not bought, they are sold’, but the idea here is that they are sold to eager acquirers and that the act of selling does not therefore depress the price too much. The same cannot be said of what we have experienced these past six weeks or so.
If the damage in the major indices—measured from the early December highs—has so far been limited to a ‘corrective’ 10%, others—whether geographically more far-flung or more sector-specific—have not been so fortunate. Continue reading