2019

It's been a while since I had a public post on Credit Writedowns. So I thought now would be a good time to post given Wednesday's Fed rate decision and presser and today's jobs report. I think this one-two punch is a big deal. And that's…

I want to tie a number of economic and political topics together today as a way of thinking about what the next 18 months in the US will mean. And a lot of it starts with the US domestic economy. Recession watch Over the past several years,…

The Fed's discomfortFor the better part of 4 years, I have been telling you that the Federal Reserve has been uncomfortable with a mid-cycle role which required it to keep rates at zero percent. The Fed sees its role as principally reserved…

The latest polling data show Americans in favour of an impeachment investigation, one that the White House is telling government officials and allies to impede. I think this is an error in strategy by Trump. And the ultimate consequence may…

The US jobs report released just earlier this morning showed the US economy adding 136,000 jobs to payrolls in September, with the unemployment rate declining to a 50-year low of 3.5%. This is the latest in a batch of economic data showing…

Inter-subjectivity For the past couple of weeks, I have been listening to an audiobook recommended by a friend I recently visited in London. It It's called Sapiens - and it bills itself as "a brief history of humankind". I find the book a…

Shellacking the retail investor I am glad WeWork is in the headlines these days, since I told you in May that I see it going to zero eventually. Now, I've been sanguine about a so-called bubble in these unicorns for a number of years. And…

Back in May, I wrote a post I titled "2019 may be the best time to IPO". The gist of the post was that unicorns were seeing the best market conditions imaginable for conducting an initial public offering. But, the window for loss-making…

With the latest Fed and ECB rate policy decisions now behind us, we can start to assess what monetary policy means for the near-term future. I continue to be encouraged by near-term data flow in the US. Nothing in it reads recession.…

Understanding curve flattening Long-time readers know that I have talked for a number of years about a longer-term global convergence to zero play that I see shaping up. It first emerged during the mid-cycle slowdown in 2015 and 2016 as…