Some readers may be interested in putting a voice – and even a face – to the author. Below are links to three recent audio-visual publications in which I discuss US & Chinese macro as well as the interrelations between the three great asset classes of stocks, bonds, an commodities. Following on is a wider sampling of my views. Continue reading
Category Archives: Macro
Ten Years After
A little over 10 years ago, a hitherto obscure German institution called IKB – majority-owned by an arm of the German government – suddenly made headlines around the world.
On the last day of July 2007, a company which ironically had its origins in a foredoomed effort to ‘stimulate’ the German economy in the aftermath of the Weimar Republic’s disastrous by financing small businesses, but also by partaking of the contemporary, pre-Depression boom in real estate, revealed that, once again, it had been seduced by the lure of a property bubble. [A version of this article appeared as part of the inaugural edition of ETF Stream] Continue reading
Gibson’s Non-Paradox
Birmingham statistician and financial forecaster Arthur H. Gibson’s so-called ‘paradox’ came about from his detailed empirical findings that the level of bond yields (as measured by the price of British Consols) tended to follow – with a lag of around a year – the price of wholesale commodities (a measure he adopted, as he himself explained, as a proxy for what he thought was the real crux of the issue, the cost of consumable necessities for which no comparable data existed). Argument has abounded as to the phenomenon’s true explanation, ever since.
Here we go again…
As world stock markets have continued to climb to cyclical – if not all-time – highs, it has become almost the norm for industry Talking Heads to season their smatterings of media insight with a brief, talismanic expression of scepticism, uttered partly to appease the ever-jealous God of the Markets but mainly so as to be on record as ‘having foreseen the crash’ as and when one eventually occurs.
Dreams of Gerontius
At the end of last month, the Mighty Oz’s and Grand Panjandrums of central banking descended upon the rural splendours of Wyoming in order to engage in a very public display of navel gazing and to enact a ritual, group reinforcement of confirmation bias.
There, we heard much nonsense talked about low – even negative -‘natural interest rates’ and of the seeming impossibility of triggering an alchemically meaningful dose of price inflation with which to restore the balance of the humours in the global economy.
It was most timely, then, for the ever-mischievous BIS to publish a paper first presented last year by Charles Goodhart & Manoj Pradhan which challenged much of the received wisdom of our monetary overlords and which broadly affirmed arguments I, too, have long been offering against their approach.
Please click the link to read more:-
China: Turn of the Tide?
In an earlier Monitor, we alluded to a possible monetary reason for suspecting that the past year’s spectacular (and inflationary) bounce in Chinese revenues and earnings might have reached its high-water mark.
Here we take a more detailed look at the situation in the Middle Kingdom:-
Patterns, Predictions & the PMI
Certain schools of thought – among them the so-called ‘Market Monetarists’, as well as George Selgin’s Fractional Free Bankers – believe – in line with the thinking of the later Hayek – that the Fed would be better off effecting policy with regard to the maintenance of a steady rate of growth of nominal GDP.
Consciously or otherwise, we would argue that this is largely what it has done, over the years, and that this insight helps us tie together developments in the PMI, in business income streams, and in the Fed funds rate.
Please click the link for the details
The Mephisto Polka
[This article appeared in edited form in the Epoch Times and also in the Daily Telegraph]
In her recent set-piece testimony before Congress, Janet Yellen made clear that she is determined to repeat the sort of ‘gradualism’ in raising rates that proved so disastrous after the Tech bust. In other words, that she will not so much boil the frog slowly as encourage him to go out and make a further raft of foredoomed, highly-leveraged investment decisions before he realises he’s been cooked.
The Fed’s Non-Barking Dogs
[This article appeared in slightly abridged form in the Epoch Times under the title, ‘The Fed’s Quantitative Tightening‘]
The older a bull market gets, those who are paid to comment on it become more and more desperate for new things to say about it – a professionally pressing need which tends to split the pundits into two distinct camps, each equally one-eyed about whether prospects are good or bad.
Pluto’s Republic
The more our would-be Philosopher Kings attempt to display the awesome panoply of their intellectual armour, the more we think, not of the Greek sage from whom they seem to draw inspiration, but of Mickey Mouse’s dopey canine friend.
In bonds, the Bears are mounting another one of their forlorn hope charges against the central bank ramparts which is, in turn, rendering equities a little more expensive in relative, as well as absolute, terms. Commodities, meanwhile, are firmly rooted in mean reversion mode.
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