Monthly Macro Monitor – August 2020
One of the advantages we enjoy here at Alhambra is the opportunity to interact with a lot of investors. We talk to hundreds of individual investors on a monthly basis, giving us a front-row seat to everyone’s fear and greed. Economic data tells us about the past, which isn’t particularly useful for investors focused on the future. Sentiment, though, is [...]
SPECIAL REPORT: Follow The Money – Volume 5
If the recession was the first "shoe to drop", what's the second...or third? The shock of the self-inflicted COVID recession is behind us. What we're all wondering now is what comes next? Will the economy recover to its previous state? Something better? Something worse? That will be determined by the second and third-order effects and they are already starting. Our Special [...]
Monthly Market Monitor – July 2020
Most Long-Term Trends Have Not Changed A lot has changed over the last 4 months since the COVID virus started to impact the global economy. Asia was infected first with China at ground zero. Their economy succumbed first with a large part of the country shut down to a degree that can only be accomplished in an authoritarian regime. The [...]
Monthly Macro Monitor – June 2020
The stock market has recovered most of its losses from the March COVID-19 induced sell-off and the enthusiasm with which stocks are being bought – and sold but mostly bought – could lead one to believe that the crisis is over, that the economy has completely or nearly completely recovered. Unfortunately, other markets do not support that notion nor does [...]
Market vs Economy: A Time Mismatch
“Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.” Stephen Hawking The economic news over the last month has been as awful as anyone alive has ever seen. Unemployment has risen from 3.5% to 14.7% since February with nearly 15 million Americans filing for jobless benefits in the last month alone. The CFNAI hit its third-worst reading ever and that [...]
Do We Need A “New” Capitalism?
Everyone, or at least all the right-thinking people, believes that capitalism needs to be reformed. Elizabeth Warren calls her version Accountable Capitalism. Marco Rubio dusted off an 1891 speech by Pope Leo to advocate what he calls Common Good Capitalism. Both are attempts to correct what these lawyers see as flaws in the current incarnation of economic organization that is [...]
OPEC + Reality
Two weeks ago, OPEC+ and the US came to a deal to cut crude oil production. President Trump hailed the deal, saying it would save “hundreds of thousands” of oil patch jobs. The Texas Railroad Commission meets today to “consider” a cut in oil production in the Lone Star state. Meanwhile, the market has made all this high-level negotiating irrelevant, [...]
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