One Great Big Difference

On a beautiful midsummer day, roughly six months ago, two distinguished men, of distinguished stature, crossed paths under precarious circumstances.  They are very much alike, these two distinguished men.

Let’s confuse him…  [PT]

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Almost Predictable

One of the more enticing things about financial markets is not that they’re predictable.  Or that they’re not predictable.  It’s that they’re almost predictable… or at least they seem they should be.

For a long time people believed – and from what we read and hear, many still do – that economic cycles move in easily predictable, regular time periods. All you had to do was create a chart of the up and down waves of your favorite cycle model and extrapolate it into the future, and presto, your prediction was ready to be sold. But it turns out it is not that simple. The chart above was published by the “Inflation Survival Letter” in the late 1970s and purported to show the future trend of the so-called Kondratiev Wave, a cycle invented by Soviet economist Nikolai Kondratiev (who was eventually deported to the GULAG and killed by the Stalin regime, after a fellow American economics professor denounced him to the communists in Moscow as a “counter-revolutionary”). Interestingly, their forecast of the trend in wholesale prices turned out to be correct, but everything else they predicted in this context was incorrect. According to the K-Wave theory, the year 2000 was supposed to have been the trough of a major economic depression, with extremely high unemployment, a plunging stock market and all the other symptoms associated with a giant bust. In reality, the year 2000 was the peak of a major boom, with unemployment almost reaching a record low and stock prices soaring to unprecedented valuations. There was a time when the seeming elegance and simplicity of models like Kondratiev’s had our attention as well. There are ways of rationalizing such models. For instance, one could argue that it takes a few generations to “forget the lessons of a depression” and end the risk aversion and penchant for saving it inculcates in the public. There are certainly kernels of truth in this, but the fact remains that the future is unknowable. Kondratiev e.g. didn’t know that the communist empire would crumble in 1990 and that half the world would join the hampered market economy of the nominally capitalist West. This was undoubtedly one of the factors helping to extend the economic boom well into the 1990s (precisely because it kept prices low, which in turn enabled central banks to implement loose monetary policies). [PT]

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Stars in the Night Sky

The U.S. stock market’s recent zigs and zags have provoked much squawking and screeching.  Wall Street pros, private money managers, and Millennial index fund enthusiasts all find themselves on the wrong side of the market’s swift movements.  Even the best and brightest can’t escape President Trump’s tweet precipitated short squeezes.

The Donald mercilessly hits the shorts with a well-timed tweet. But as it turns out, this market is in a really bad mood at the moment. [PT]

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Yosemite Sam Gets Worried About Federal Debt

In a talk which garnered little attention, one of the Deep State’s prime operatives, National Security Advisor John Bolton, cautioned of the enormous and escalating US debt.

Deep State operative John Bolton, a.k.a. Yosemite Sam [PT]

Photo credit: Mark Wilson / Getty Images

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