Sunday 5, June 2022

The European project

This week’s Macro Compass talks about the ‘hidden dual mandate’ of the ECB. The hidden bit is the need to keep the Eurozone from breaking up. Alf argues that it’s going to be impossible to keep the PIIGS solvent and at …

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Saturday 4, June 2022

Mortgage REITs

Harley Bassman is highly regarded. He’s very knowledgeable about mortgage-backed securities. He has written about the fact that MBS REITs might be a profitable (long) investment in the current rate environment. The basic idea is that they are priced as a bond with …

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Wednesday 1, June 2022

Levine again on how money works

Money is an entry in a bank ledger somewhere. A US dollar account at your UK bank is a liability of the bank’s, which is exactly matched by an asset which is that bank’s account with a US …

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31 May 22

Job Shock

Zerohedge was its usual apocalypic self in this article about weakness in the jobs market. Clearly, a lot of new economy firms always had terrible economics, and now they cannot raise equity capital at zero cost, they are looking to find other ways of increasing …

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Monday 30, May 2022

International Health Outcomes Index

It’s remarkable how well Japan does, and how badly the US does. We are depressingly low in the table, well below countries like Portugal, which have much lower GDP per capita than the UK. The NHS, while scoring well on access …

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Sunday 29, May 2022

Shadow Banning

I like Twitter. It works for me. I can easily unfollow (or mute, or turn off re-tweets etc.) to fine tune the stuff I see in my timeline. A lot of very smart people are on Twitter, and I’ve learned a lot from …

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Friday 27, May 2022

Rudy Havenstein

Rudy got kicked off Twitter, even though all he ever did was hurl hand grenades at the Fed and the US Treasury. I don’t think he’s always right, but he’s always interesting. His theory is that the Fed is the font …

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Thursday 26, May 2022

A chart to strike terror into the heart of any trader

The tendency of all organizations to become self-serving

This is about how criminal, and other enterprises, tend to degrade in their morality over time. The author makes the case that organizations become focussed on their …

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Wednesday 25, May 2022

Found in The Rational Walk’s weekly digest for last week

Worth a read:

• Madoff and FTX. Pam Martens draws parallels between a crypto exchange (FTX) and the Bernie Madoff Ponzi. As ever, the SEC were extremely reluctant to act. What was remarkable was how Madoff …

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Tuesday 24, May 2022

Housing-led recession?

This

Five year breakevens rolling over

 https://www.tradingview.com/x/1kdTOYjT/

Wrap

The market seems to have decided that a recession is coming. The shorter and longer yield curves are inverted. Bonds rallied across the board today. Although the DJIA eked out a …

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