15 Sept 2021

Substack update

I decided to bite the bullet and parlay my blog, generated by Pelican into an actual newsletter. I had a try using Convert Kit, but I got bored with cutting and pasting. It wasn’t too bad for the actual post, but I have a …

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14 Sept 2021

EPS for US shares has been on a monotonic trend for eighty five years.

This is a pretty amazing chart, which I’ve stolen from This week’s Callum Thomas’ Chartstorm

Basically, earnings per share have kept going up by around 6% annually, relentlessly, since 1935.

Will …

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13 Sept

House prices

House prices continue to soar in the US. Maybe this will reverse, maybe it won’t. The question is: what catalyst will prompt the Fed to tighten monetary policy? What constituency is ever going to clamour for a move that is very likely to spook stocks …

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10th Sept

Matt Stoller on monopoly

Everyone has noticed that the stockmarket in the USA has had an incredible run over the last year or two. The finger of blame (or praise, possibly) is pointed at the Fed. I am not convinced that the Fed is solely responsible. The ECB …

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9 Sept 2021

Job openings

Long Term Trends

This site is worth a look. It gives a monthly look at, well, long term trends. It shows that valuations for US equities are really very stretched indeed. The site gets its data from Quandl, mainly, which seems to have been bought …

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8 Sept 2021

Health and social care bill

The Economist magazine has a good summary of the latest Boris (possible) blunder, here. The headlines focus on the idea that the new bill is going to “”fix the crisis in social care once and for all”, but the reality is that …

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7 Sept 2021

It’s probably a really bad time to buy a house in the UK

This anim shows how house prices have changed over the last couple of hundred years. Today is an absolutely terrible time to buy, from a investment point of view. But, this is the …

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6 Sept 2021

Better living through electric cars

The USA, like Europe, is determined to replace ICE cars with BEVs (battery electric vehicles). Consumers are waking up to the limitations of these cars, which results in sales being weaker than forecast. The result, inevitably, will be bigger subsidies, especially since …

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4 Sept 2021

The week

The resignation of Suga, the Japanese PM, seems to have had a galvanizing effect on the Japanese stock market. I don’t know anything about the politics over there. My understanding was that he was just a caretaker PM, brought in because Abe became too …

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3 Sept 2021

What is Afghanistan all about

I listened to this podcast recently. It’s about Afghanistan, and what went wrong, and what it’s like to live there. It’s about why economics, and particularly property rights are behind a lot of the violence in the country. It …

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