weekend notes

Hope all goes well… Dusted off a hopeful anecdote from 15 years ago, from around the time I started publishing, back when the world was still healing from the GFC, and Europe was yet to fully realize the depth of its debt crisis. It feels like we’ve got a long road to travel to get to the other side of our latest turmoil, so much of it self-inflicted, senseless. But there’s always the underlying f

Anecdote: A crisis that caught the imagination of the western world was the UK’s exit from Europe’s Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) on September 16, 1992. We called that Black Wednesday. I was 25, Lehman London, just young and dumb enough to find it not particularly surprising. I was trading short term interest rates at the time, and along with the UK’s central bank, Sweden had also been intervening

Hope all goes well… “I guess they say it was the biggest day in financial history,” said President Trump Wednesday, his unexpectedly quick capitulation from a self-inflicted policy catastrophe had sparked a surge in stock prices. “Nobody’s ever heard of it. It’s gonna be a record,” he boasted, the cameras clicking. The stock market had been in freefall, as had the US dollar and the Treasury market

Anecdote: “In the late 1800s through the early 1900s, businesspeople were seen to best understand economics,” said Sparks, investor, entrepreneur, iconoclast. “Maynard Keynes came along in the 1920s-30s and helped us see that businesspeople may have understood microeconomics but had little grasp of macroeconomics.” For example, in microeconomics, saving money is a good thing. In macroeconomics, if

Hope all goes well… “It would have been easy to keep pumping up the economy, borrowing a lot of money, creating a lot of government jobs,” explained Treasury Secretary Bessent to Tucker Carlson, defending the administration’s policies, while describing the extent to which Biden juiced up the US economy, like a body builder on steroids, appearing strong while destroying his internal organs. “There

Anecdote: “Where’s the marginal demand going to come from to increase corporate profits?” asked Sparks. “The government is spending at full bore, the consumer has been spending at full bore,” he said. “What we do have is the AI capex cycle – that’s the Nivida story – but we’re not going to get more aggressive investment in this sector. You can’t build data centers and power capacity at

Hope all goes well… “Some countries are weaponizing trade and forcing companies to take sides and make choices that go against economic principles,” said Xi Jinping, standing in the Great Hall of the People, a group of 40 of leading global CEOs in attendance. The US had announced additional secondary tariffs of 25% on any country that buys Venezuelan oil. US tariffs on China were lifted to 20% thi

Anecdote: We were discussing thought experiments. Charlie, my youngest. He’s studying Hobbes and Locke, English political philosophers. Hobbes saw humans as selfish, brutish, competitive, driven by fear, desire. Locke was more optimistic. Hard to know who is right, but running thought experiments helps. I like to explore such things in the extreme, searching for vivid contrast. Like many of our di

Hope all goes well… Left the parking garage and engaged Autopilot. Tesla’s AI knows my habits, optimized the route home. It’s been four years since I first let it take control. Initially, it was unnerving, adolescent, like being driven by an indecisive16-year-old. With each software update Autopilot matures, in quiet communication with the cloud. It’s not perfect, but that day is approaching fast.