Friday 22, April 2022
Wrap
There was a fairly strong risk-off end to the week. Bonds were weak, but otherwise the predictable moves occurred: dollar up, equities down, commodities down. I don’t talk about crypto much, because, well, I don’t really understand it from a supply and demand point of view. It seems to me that the supply is, in effect, infinite, but it has a real value which means that this probably is not the case. However, BTC tracked NDX pretty much tick for tick: both down about 3%.
Supposedly, the catalyst was J Powell saying that he was committed to taming inflation. To my mind, market reaction has been enough to tighten without a string of 50bp hikes, but I don’t have a PhD in economics.
$SPY $QQQ $AAPL $AMZN $FB $MSFT $NFLX $TSLA pic.twitter.com/cAgOBgmdL1
— Kenneth Towers (@KentagiousDance) April 21, 2022
Images
Tilda Swinton by Floria Sigismondi pic.twitter.com/77WRuBEivP
— Daniel Brami (@Daniel_Red_Eire) April 22, 2022
Taking risks
A lot of people comment on how risk-averse millennials are. I wonder if it’s because their experience of life is too similar to that of their parents. The baby boomers experienced a coming of age in a world which was very different to that of their parents. They came into a world of high demand for labour and no war and an explosion of new technologies. They had access to a lot of experiences their parents did not, which made them, perhaps, less deferential to wisdom of their parents and, therefore, more willing to experiment.
Maybe there is nothing in this, but as a boomer, I feel that I had a very different experience of life, which, possibly, made me more risk-taking.
Read of the day
Ben Hunt’s Epsilon Theory is amazing reading. He has written about credentialism, here. Read it. He invites us to see things differently, to remove our blindfolds. I particularly liked the quote from Frank Gallagher (William H. Macy) in Shameless, a peerless series.
Nearly half of white students admitted to Harvard between 2009 and 2014 were recruited athletes, legacy students, children of faculty and staff, or on the dean’s interest list—applicants whose parents or relatives have donated to Harvard, according to a 2019 study published in the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Higher education, like law, and medicine, are sectors that have no apparent limits to growth. The resources they drain from productive activity is driving down productivity and creating an economic disaster.
Comments !