Referring to Dizard’s FT piece in a series of tweets just after Christmas, Bank analyst Chris Whalen said, “"With 30-year conventional mortgage rates closing in on 2.5% APR and the FOMC buying 1.5% MBS coupons as part of quantitative easing, this is a good time to take cash off the table in IMBs and REITs, and go buy a well-located residential home."
ADG consulted interest rate historians Sidney Homer and Richard Sylla who opined “nominal negative yielding debt had never been seen in material size in the 4,000 years of interest rate history prior to the current cycle.” Economist Ludwig von Mises never imagined such a thing,
“He wants to put his inheritance toward ending capitalism,” Zoë Beery wrote for the NYT, “and by that he means using his money to undo systems that accumulate money for those at the top, and that have played a large role in widening economic and racial inequality.” Wow, that is some self-loathing. If only Ludwig von Mises were able to counsel young Jacobs, whose grandfather founded Qualcomm, and is set to inherit $100 million. In his book Epistemological Problems of Economics, Mises wrote, “Through all the changes in the prevailing system of social stratification, moral philosophers continued to hold fast to the fundamental idea of Cicero’s doctrine that making money is degrading.”
The US economy is split into “the weirdest economy ever” when writing about The Trucking Boom and Online sales, and “the most distorted economy ever” when addressing the record low junk bond yields.
Libertarians who claim the government’s actions are worse than the disease, are giving the government too much credit. Consumers are driving the slow-down, not governments.
In investmentland, it’s “Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin,” again knocking on dollar door number 20,000, where it ventured in late 2017. Bloomberg’s November 21st edition features this flashy headline sure to inspire FOMO (fear of missing out) the predecessor of the more quaint Keynesian Animal Spirits
Meanwhile, the ever-unloved asset, gold, goes unnoticed by the stock trading debutantes. After a sprint upward in price above $2,000, the yellow metal hangs listlessly around $1,870 these days, while the aforementioned Bitcoin is repeating a parabolic move toward $20,000.
Trump’s lady in waiting for the Federal Reserve, Judy Shelton, is losing Republican support by the day. The Washington Post unleashed its comeliest columnist, Catherine Rampell, to finish off Ms. Shelton, who’s primary negative is her past support for the gold standard, and her questioning the need for the central bank at all.Adherents of the Austrian School of Economics have been cuckoo for Shelton for those very reasons, but, Ms. Rampell describes the Fed nominee as “a demonstrably unqualified partisan quack.”
Think about it; with Joe Biden in the White House, Janet Yellon at Treasury and Jerome Powell at the Eccles Building, do you own enough gold?
Maybe the economy wasn’t so hot. Dannielle DiMartino Booth, who once worked for Richard Fisher at the Dallas Fed, told Raoul Pal on Real Vision, “September the 16th [2019], when they launched Not QE. Because the inversion of the 2s 10s had passed the 30-day mark, and they're like, oh my god, history says that we're in recession.
That magic DJIA number is 28,052. So, as of today Trump has nearly 400 Dow points of cushion. But, keep an eye on the Dow, 400 points can be lost overnight, in a morning, or an afternoon. Now you know why Mr. Trump pays so much attention to the stock market. That’s the only poll he trusts or cares about.
“The cost of one megabyte of hard drive memory has fallen from approximately $1 million in 1967 to 2 cents today,” writes Booth. We can easily imagine what that means for the cool stuff that will be on our smartphones. What I can’t fathom is what cheaper computing power will do for the price of a can of beans.
This may be overblown. BYU-Idaho administrators might be clairvoyant and issuing warnings just to head off any bright ideas students might have to raise a little money. WRCBtv reports, “Mimi Taylor, spokeswoman for Eastern Idaho Public Health, told CNN that she believed the school put out the statement as a preemptive measure intended to keep students from getting any ideas.”
Benoit points out that the banks used a bit of financial hocus pocus to improve their earnings. “The results were boosted because the banks didn’t have to put aside as much money to cover future loan losses,”
Masks of all shapes and sizes are everywhere. But now, just in time for halloween, a company called 3wishes, the very morning after a fly landed and stayed on VP Mike Pence’s grey carefully coiffed hair during last night’s Vice Presidential debate has created the Debate Fly Wig. T
While speculators in London’s Exchange Alley furiously bid up the price of South Sea Company shares, word came that two dock workers unloading wool were overcome by dizziness.
Bob Woodward takes his second bite from the Trump apple, with “Rage.” Woodward has completed the interview circuit with his biggest prop being Trump on tape. Trump cooperated and the esteemed author had the president saying what he knew and when he knew it: about the coronavirus, of course.
“The trend could put more Americans on a path to greater wealth and financial security,” Krantz writes, presumably with a straight face. “But it remains to be seen if the beginning investors will stick around for the long haul — or if they'll have the investing skills to avoid losses when stocks take a tumble.”
“Industrial civilization,” Sale writes, “in other words, is an inherently self-destructive system with limits beyond which it cannot survive, and utterly consumes itself like the self-burning tree of Gambia discovered by Mungo Park.”
Tom Blanchard, realtor and president of trade association Las Vegas Realtors, describes the Las Vegas housing market as being “on fire.” Mr. Segall reports, “All told, the market has gained speed as buyers snap up homes from builders and on the resale market, with sellers fetching multiple bids.” Blanchard says simply, “It’s craziness.”
