Tag: booms

REVISITING THE ANATOMY OF A BUBBLE

Via Variant Perception

Jeremy Grantham’s recent piece, Let the wild rumpus begin, argued that the US is in its 4th “superbubble” of the last 100 years and is in its final stages.  This inspired us to refresh our bubble framework (below, taken from our 2017 blog post).  Many valuation measures of the US equity market are near historic highs and with the Fed about to tighten monetary policy, investors should naturally be skeptical of US equity allocations.

We are heavily influenced by the work of Charles Kindleberger and Hymen Minsky at Variant Perception, and we’ve dedicated much of our work to understanding how boom and bust cycles progress.

Continue reading “REVISITING THE ANATOMY OF A BUBBLE”

TICK TOCK

“This country, and with it most of the Western world, is presently going through a period of inflation and credit expansion. As the quantity of money in circulation and deposits subject to check increases, there prevails a general tendency for the prices of commodities and services to rise. Business is booming. Yet such a boom, artificially engineered by monetary and credit expansion, cannot last forever. It must come to an end sooner or later. For paper money and bank deposits are not a proper substitute for non-existing capital goods. Economic theory has demonstrated in an irrefutable way that a prosperity created by an expansionist monetary and credit policy is illusory and must end in a slump, an economic crisis. It has happened again and again in the past, and it will happen in the future, too.” – Ludwig von Mises – 1952

Image result for recession

Continue reading “TICK TOCK”

WHAT KEEPS THEM UP AT NIGHT

“Government has coddled, accepted, and ignored white collar crime for too long. It is time the nation woke up and realized that it’s not the armed robbers or drug dealers who cause the most economic harm, it’s the white collar criminals living in the most expensive homes who have the most impressive resumes who harm us the most. They steal our pensions, bankrupt our companies, and destroy thousands of jobs, ruining countless lives.” – Harry Markopolos, Madoff Whistleblower

Image result for bank ceos in front of congress

The tenth anniversary of the Wall Street created financial catastrophe brought back some bittersweet memories this week. I wrote my first articles during the summer/fall of 2008 for Seeking Alpha. They included: Is The U.S Banking System Safe? (Aug 2008), The Great Consumer Crash of 2009 (Aug 2008), Looming Financial Catastrophe: A Real Inconvenient Truth (Aug 2008), Is Wachovia the Worst Run Bank in America (Sept 2008), The U.S. on the Precipice (Sept 2008), On Board the U.S.S. Titanic (Sept 2008), Our Coming Depression (Oct 2008), among others. I was pumping out 5,000 word articles every 2 or 3 days.

Continue reading “WHAT KEEPS THEM UP AT NIGHT”

QUOTES OF THE DAY

“There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.”

– Ludwig von Mises

“No very deep knowledge of economics is usually needed for grasping the immediate effects of a measure; but the task of economics is to foretell the remoter effects, and so to allow us to avoid such acts as attempt to remedy a present ill by sowing the seeds of a much greater ill for the future.”

– Ludwig von Mises

“Central banks are at serious risk of exhausting the policy room for manoeuver over time.”

– Jaime Caruana, General Manager of the Bank for International Settlements

“The gap between the models in the world of monetary policymaking is now wider than at any time since the 1930s.”

– Benjamin Friedman, William Joseph Maier Professor of Political Economy, Harvard