Leverage

You can get contradictory views on almost every aspect of investing. For every willing seller, there has to be a willing buyer.

I liked this from Stanley Druckenmiller, a ‘guru’:

[In March 2008.] I learned a lot at Soros, but not what I thought I would learn. I did …

There are comments.

Market action

Seems like the main thing happening today is that the dollar is starting to feel the impact of central bank money printing. Commodities are up, across the board, equities are up (well, it would take a huge meteor strike on NYC to affect that), and bonds are up …

There are comments.

Krushner and Kodak

You’ve probably heard about how Kodak came to be loaned an extraordinary amount of money to make a drug to tread Covid-19 that nobody thinks works with the result that insiders may become obscenely rich. So far, so well-known. What I had not realized previously was …

There are comments.

Morning

I just stumbled on The Cow Guy. Crazy suit, crazy guy, but he talked a lot of sense on corn. The news was bad, but the price rallied. As he explained, this is what happens. How long it continues, nobody knows, though, so be careful!

August VIX future ticks …

There are comments.

Fiscal Dominance

We are starting to hear more about the concept of fiscal dominance — here and here as well as MMT. Various central bankers for years have been pleading with governments to shoulder more of the burden of getting inflation to go up. Well, now it seems they are getting …

There are comments.

Morning Call

UK GDP headed down by more than 20% in the quarter but the FTSE goes up. Well, both entirely predictable, but still, in a way, shocking.

Joe Biden (or his minders) announce that it’s Kamala Harris, to just about nobody’s surprise. I guess this probably increases …

There are comments.

Inflation: the bear case

Although everyone and his pet monkey is writing about how inflation is around the corner, we haven’t seen it yet, and most of them have been saying that for years anyway. This article, by Michael Strobaek, global chief investment officer at Credit Suisse, argues that …

There are comments.

Extend and Pretend goes wild

If you reclassify debt enough, it never goes bad. So creditors never have to worry … do they? The funny thing is that credit card debt went right down, which probably mainly just reflects a crash in consumer spending. When Milton Friedman was in his prime …

There are comments.

All day

It’s Saturday. I didn’t pay attention to markets today. There weren’t any open. I did read a few articles in the FT saying that inflation was coming, but that buying gold is an unreliable way of profiting from that. I also read one saying that …

There are comments.

Morning call

The markets are mainly dead, with a couple of exceptions:

• Silver has caught fire, overtaking gold in percentage increase terms,
• The Turkish Lira seems in deep trouble.

I see a lot of press coverage of gold (and a bit of silver) and the inevitable return to discussion of …

There are comments.