The US equity markets are mostly at or near all time highs. The SPX P/E ratio is around 31, according to something I read, although measuring this is probably tricky as headline earnings are almost never GAAP now, but “adjusted.” It seems hard to believe …
read moreThere are comments.
Wall St on Parade has done a thorough job of eviscerating Rob Kaplan. To quote Ben Hunt, they are not even pretending any more. It just seems insane that someone in his position was trading futures, in large size, while being in possession of …
read moreThere are comments.
Transparency International maintains a league table of corruption. It’s the the sort of league table one doesn’t want one’s home country to be at the top of. To be fair, there are many countries which are less transparent than the …
read moreThere are comments.
This article runs through a number of explanations of how 30MM US American men can live without being in the formal workforce. There is nothing very extraordinary about the ways: basically, the black economy is probably bigger than you think, and quite a few people …
read moreThere are comments.
Various reflation skeptics, such as Lacy Hunt, Harley Bassman, Jeff Snider have been saying that inflation is going to crater. As I blogged a while ago, the increasing inequality in the US and elsewhere has caused the propensity to spend to plummet. In my …
read moreThere are comments.
When I was a kid, Dominick Harrod would have a slot on the six o’clock BBC news explaining the latest twists of the economy. He dutifully reported the latest trade figures, always pointing out how important “invisibles” were to offsetting some of …
read moreThere are comments.
Harvey Bassman has written a nice short tutorial on how mortgage REITs work. You can read it here (pdf). He focusses on the non-linear response of the value of the security to interest rates. These things are pretty high risk, but if you think that short …
read moreThere are comments.
This argues that all the woes of the world come from our failure to sort out housing policy. It fits neatly in with this article in last week’s Spectator magazine which argues that doing anything which might unsettle asset prices, particularly house prices, is politically …
read moreThere are comments.