It is impossible to escape the negativity toward bonds these days. And with good reason, I suppose, since the returns from the asset class have been lousy for some time. The 7-10 year Treasury index is down 1.42% this year, which doesn't sound like much, but being down on the safest asset in your portfolio is a bit jarring. It [...]
As I learned years ago, you can take two different kinds of hikes on the trails around Jackson Hole. I can sum up my hikes with former Vice Chairman Don Kohn in two words: I survived. These steely marathon death marches revealed a side of Don I wasn't ready for. There's another kind of hike—one I associate with Chairman Ben [...]
It seems like a lot has happened over the last few weeks. At the end of July, Treasury Secretary Bessent used the exchange stabilization fund to purchase Yen by selling Euros. That intervention was intended, according to the accepted wisdom, to prevent the Japanese from selling US Treasuries to fund purchases of the Yen themselves. The Japanese are large holders [...]
Questions, questions, questions. Investors always have lots of questions, most of them about the future, which makes them very hard impossible to answer. That doesn't mean the questions aren't worth asking though, which is why I do this every few months. Thinking about what we don't know can prepare us for the future no matter how it turns out. And [...]
If you look at the history of Wall Street marketing, it’s all testosterone, lightning-fast trades, and aggressive "market-beating" bravado. But if you look at the actual data, a very different story emerges. The 19th-century American humorist Josh Billings once captured the ultimate truth of investing without even knowing it. He wrote: "It’s not what a man don’t know that makes [...]
I write an overview of the economy about once a month and for the longest time the entire thing could have been summed up in a single sentence: nothing has changed since the last time I wrote about the economy. Of course, over a month we shouldn't expect much change but even over longer periods, the economy is remarkably consistent. [...]
Faced with a choice between changing one's mind and proving there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy with the proof. J.K. Galbraith I've learned so much from my mistakes, I'm thinking of making a few more. Anonymous I was prepared to dislike our new Fed Chairman, Kevin Warsh. His past track record at the Fed stood [...]
You can't take the same actions as everyone else and expect to outperform. In order to outperform, by definition, you have to depart from the crowd. You have to hold a different position. If your portfolio looks like everyone else's, you may do well, or you may do poorly, but you can't do different. And being different is absolutely essential [...]
It just goes to show ya. It's always something. If it's not one thing, it's another. - Roseanne Roseannadanna, played by Gilda Radner on SNL So, was that it? Is the AI boom over? It seems like just a month or so ago that any stock even vaguely associated with AI was going up on a daily basis. Nvidia was [...]
Economic Stability One of the remarkable things about the US economy is how stable it has been over the last 4 years. I know it doesn't feel that way sometimes - most of the time? - but from an aggregate viewpoint, that is the reality. We can see this stability in a variety of economic reports as well as in [...]
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