What Is Going On With the U.S. and World Economy? There are times when things with which I am very familiar are reported in the financial media with 80% accuracy. And there are other times when things with which I am very familiar are reported in the financial media with 20% Read more
Global Winners and Losers in the Oil Shakeout Oil analysts were mostly caught flat-footed by the price decline that began to unfold in June of last year, which has become one of six such drops of greater than 30 percent over the past three decades. Oil price forecasting techniques range from Read more
Market Summary We believe that although a full or partial retest of recent lows may occur, the correction’s worst is over, and if the past is a guide, U.S. stocks will appreciate over the next six-month time-frame, volatility will be with us as the market retests its bottom and then Read more
The End Is Not Nigh The driver of real American exceptionalism is the open, experimental, experiential, non-judgmental, data-driven approach that academic and entrepreneur Sebastian Thrun appreciates so much about Silicon Valley culture. Thrun, who was a tenured robotics and artificial intelligence professor at Stanford, as well as a Google Fellow, Read more
China Is Not Crashing Panic over Chinese stock markets and the Chinese economy is irrational. There has been no historical correlation between the Chinese stock market and the Chinese economy, and there is no indication that the Chinese economy is crashing. In China, we see a maturing economy navigating a Read more
Why Are Global Markets So Interconnected? It’s because of the history of how markets and their participants have evolved. I entered the business as an analyst in 1968, after having been a part-time private investor from the late 1950s during my teenage years. My experience is that through the 1980s, stocks Read more
Running a Farm Like a Supply Chain We wrote last June about the arrival of big data in agriculture. In late 2013, the controversial agriculture giant, Monsanto, (NYSE: MON) bought a private company called the Climate Corporation, which had assembled a massive database — precisely mapping 25 million American fields Read more
Panic of the Day The media thinks it’s big news from China that the Yuan has fallen in U.S. Dollar terms by 4 percent as of this writing. Those who know the facts realize that this isn’t big news. The Chinese currency today sits 33 percent above where it was Read more
Not Your Grandfather’s Rate Hike With the Fed funds rate set to rise for the first time after years of extraordinary and unprecedented monetary policy, we believe that market psychology will make for a difficult investing environment. This anxiety is compounded by the fact that these rate rises will not be, Read more
Herded Into Disaster: Yield Chasing, Liquidity, and ETFs In 2002, addressing Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman on his 90th birthday, former Fed chair Ben Bernanke acknowledged the role of the Federal Reserve in worsening the financial crisis of the Great Depression rather than helping it. He said, “You’re right, we Read more
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