weekend notes

Hope all goes well… “Today the enemy counts on popular demonstrations to strike the Islamic system,” declared Iran’s Supreme Leader, 83-years-old, in power since 1989, the year of the Tiananmen Square student slaughter and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Unrest tends to cluster. “The enemy hopes to turn the people against the Islamic Republic by psychological means, through the internet, money, and t

Hope all goes well… Dusted off an anecdote from 2011 in honor of the brave men and women who have made the ultimate sacrifice to defend our nation, history’s greatest safe haven. In this cynical moment of political dysfunction, social division, and carnage in our schools, I reflected on this anecdote on American greatness, in the sincerest hope that we each strive our utmost to secure its future.

Anecdote: Edison shared the following letter that a small US supplier of industrial chemicals sent to all its customers earlier this month: Dear Customer: I hope that you and your business are doing well. New price sheets are enclosed. I have been working at xxxxxxxxxx Industries for over 50 years. I have never seen anything like the current supply problems. Not with COVID-19 in 2020, not during N

Hope all goes well… “Biggie’s bearish and annoying, ignored,” bellowed Biggie Too, 3rd person. “That’s how the crowd treats Biggie when these cycles get started, when stocks are still at their highs and Biggie turns bearish,” said the chief global strategist for one of Wall Street’s too-big-to-fail affairs, one of only a few such cats to call this market right. “Biggie’s bearish and they congratul

The Sun fuses 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium each second to produce the outward pressure required to offset its gravity. All stable stars live in this state of hydrostatic equilibrium. When their fuel is eventually expended, gravity prevails, and they collapse into themselves, achieving new equilibriums governed by quantum law. Small stars like our Sun become white dwarfs. Larger ones be

Hope all goes well… We fielded so many calls this week on both UST and Coinbase that we decided to publish our analysis/perspective in a market note [click here]. The synopsis: Everyone is asking us. Is stablecoin a systemic risk? No. Are assets at Coinbase secure? Yes. Digital assets are demonstrating resiliency. But market pressures also demand accelerated regulatory clarity. We see regulatory p

Anecdote: “The pandemic catapulted us into a new policy paradigm,” I said. The allocator had asked for a tight explanation of what to expect from markets, policy, politics. “Monetary policy dominance ended in the pandemic, replaced by fiscal policy dominance,” I said. “So far, monetary/fiscal have been cojoined; the Fed buying bonds to finance government deficits. This shifted us to a higher and m

Hope all goes well… “For as long as we’ve been trading, every time stocks fell hard, you knew they’d step in and cut rates,” said the CIO, describing the Fed Put. “But with the kind of inflation we’re seeing now, there’s no way the Fed can cut rates just because stocks fall,” he said. “Even if the S&P were to puke 25% in a week or two, the best you could hope for from the Fed is some kind of s

The more you think about money, the less it makes sense. That is why the topic is so alluring for the masochists amongst us, attempting to solve the unsolvable, climb the unclimbable, conquer the unconquerable. We engineer thought experiments and mental models in the hope of gaining a glimpse of some truth, the scent of something real, a money-making opportunity. Japan provides an enigma to explor