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 inflation. This article from the FT pointed out that the yield on TIPs is now negative, i.e. investors expect real yields to turn negative. I don’t follow TIPS prices, but looking at a likely looking TIPS ETF price series it would seem that the markets expectation of inflation is endlessly rising. It’s hard to take a market position on this: maybe an ETF is the best way, but it seems unnatural to buy something which costs money to own. I wish I had a crystal ball, but if press coverage is any measure of inflation being about to break out, it is going to happen.

Equity indexes area shade lower, but they don’t seem to stay down for long, which is not surprising given the tsunami of liquidity that is being unleashed by the central banks.

What I’m reading

The Greenlight Investors Letter, which can be found by googling or here, is worth a look. Einhorn is keen on $BHF, Brighthouse Financial, which, as far as I can tell, is not related to the UK company of a similar name. As widely reported, he’s convinced that inflation is coming and that $TSLA is a fraud. I believe he’s right, but I also believe that it could be a very long time before it’s possible to make money out of these insights, if ever. I don’t spend a lot of time on Yahoo Finance, but they have a lot of stuff. They have the earnings call transcript for Greenlight](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/edited-transcript-glre-oq-earnings-233910148.html), which is more than is available on the FT or Reuters (that I can find, free).

Wolf Richer has more to say about the Fed and inflation.

Closing Bell

USD seems to have sagged against everything. Equities mixed. VIX down. Commodities down (in spite of a weak dollar: what’s happening?). Summary: no clear direction. Not sure what conclusion to draw. Things move forward?