Most observers would agree that Europe’s energy sector has reached a point of crisis. Political, geopolitical, and macroeconomic trends are colliding in a volatile mix that has led to significant price volatility and public anxiety. Gas has been a key culprit. Source: Jefferies Equity Research The forces that are at Read more
Interest Rates, Inflation, and the Fed’s Coming Gut Check This morning’s CPI print hit 7.5% year-over-year, up 0.6% from the previous print, and slightly worse than expected. Some (not us) had believed that December’s number would be a peak; it was not. Given trajectories of energy and housing costs, February Read more
An Instructive DeFi Hack Last week, Qubit Finance, a defi (decentralized finance) project operating on the Binance Smart Chain, was hacked to the tune of $80 million — haplessly offering the anonymous hacker a $2 million reward to “do the right thing” and return the funds. (He hasn’t done so Read more
Tactical Shifts Bring Improvement U.S. markets — stocks, bonds, and real estate — are all still very much in the process of digesting the arrival of higher rates. The recent respite from volatility may have had something to do with technical factors. First, managers who harvested losses at the end Read more
How To Understand Current Volatility, and What To Expect Markets are beginning to digest the arrival of higher rates and the start of the Fed’s balance-sheet runoff. Even more than usual, there is a host of cross-currents influencing markets as the aftershocks of the pandemic continue to reverberate through the Read more
This past weekend we were invited to present our views on the current investment landscape to the local chapter of the American Association of Individual Investors (AAII). As our title indicates, there are many macro factors at work, all of them of fundamental interest to investors. How do we rank Read more
As we noted last week, our in-house real-world inflation indicator, the Guild Basic Needs Index, has cooled from last fall’s recent year-over-year high of 31.9%. It now stands at 23.7%. It’s down from the peak, as is to be expected as the pandemic wave recedes. What we think will be Read more
Above, we noted the potential political consequences of inflation. Certainly, inflation, and erosion of real wages, is a primary element in the electorate’s increasing dissatisfaction with the current administration. It is not the only one, however. In many metropolitan areas, including those that saw protests in favor of police reform Read more
Another month, another blistering inflation report; the consumer price index rose at a 7% annual rate in December. Of course, as our regular readers have heard us say often, the methodology used to calculate that rate has changed often over the decades — invariably in a way that understates the Read more
Looming higher rates — and now, the looming run-off of the Fed balance sheet — have finally begun to penetrate market consciousness, with the result that the sell-off which had been happening “under the hood” spread more widely and visibly to the major indices. As usual, the median stock has Read more
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