Thanks very much to my old friend, Steve Sedgwick at Squawk Box Europe for the chat this morning. We looked at Growth v Value, the US v ROW, we touched on bonds and borrowing, money supply, inflation, lockdown, commodities & gold – all in under 10 minutes!
To fill out what all might seem a bit rushed on the soundfile, here are the notes I sent to accompany our chat, complete with a little extra gloss for you to read at your leisure:-
Does it make sense to plot multi-decade asset prices on a linear scale? How reliable are macro ‘profit’ estimates? Why is the curve flattening and what will a reduction in Central Bank reserve balances mean for assets?
S0me recent short snaps from my LinkedIn & Twitter feeds plus you can watch my latest update ‘China: Unbalanced’ here, on YouTube Continue reading
Having already touched upon the UK’s shaky fiscal position, all that really needs to be added, now that the Chancellor has actually delivered his Autumn Statement, is a quick, ‘I told you so!’
The gloomy prospect is thus one of more borrowing, more spending, stealth tax tinkering, an ill-advised switch to industrial intervention, cost-overrun concrete pouring, and even the setting up of a special credit facility for exporters in a country hardly noted for being under-populated with banks and other lending institutions! Continue reading
As we have laid out in some detail in our professional work, it is clear that Chinese banks have entirely lost their inhibitions about creating money these past twelve months. It is equally clear that once such money is called into existence, someone must be caught in the act of holding it when a balance sheet snapshot is taken, however eager their desire to ‘pass the bad or depreciating half-crown to the other fellow’ may be and thus regardless of what the fate of that money will be an instant after the shutter has closed on the statistical camera. Continue reading
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.
That the artificial interest rates in evidence in our hugely distorted capital and money markets can be made negative in nominal as well as in real terms is, alas, the curse of the modern age. Though entirely at odds with natural order – as we have repeatedly tried to make plain – they are also a curse that we are unlikely to have lifted any time soon, especially not in a Europe where there is no effective restraint to be had upon the exercise of his awful powers by the likes of a fanatic like Draghi.