psychology

Tim Duy wrote a post on his blog on Sunday about his optimism about the US economy that got me thinking and I want to use it as a launching pad for a discussion about baseline economic scenarios. My baseline is positive, optimistic if you…

As the war in Ukraine moves to the center of global consciousness, I think it is important to remember the various actors’ positioning, constraints and likely agendas. As much as we would like to know ‘the truth’, the reality is always that…

The title of this piece is a bit provocative but what follows is not intended to be a hit piece on the field of economics, rather I am going to use two recent articles on economics’ failure as a jumping off point for thinking about this…

I was reading a summary of Jeremy Grantham’s remarks in GMO’s recent quarterly analysis. And it occurred to me that a lot of what we see there is predicated on some embedded longer-term assumptions that I want to make clear. Grantham is…

My macro view for most of the global economy is upbeat. My only downbeat views concern deceleration of growth in emerging markets and froth in capital markets. But in the main, market and economic momentum is up and to the right. The…

Marc Faber, publisher of the Gloom, Boom & Doom Report, appeared on Bloomberg Television's "Street Smart" yesterday to discuss the impact of Fed policy on the global economy and his predictions for 2014. As you could imagine, he is…

The argument that unemployment happens when wages fail to adjust sufficiently to changed market dynamics is a well-aired one. But explanations of "sticky wages" tend to focus on structural rigidities such as employment protection…

Bubbles have become a major focus of discussion in today’s financial markets. But very few people actually define what they mean when describing this financial phenomenon.

On Friday, I read a post on the New York City housing market that got me to thinking about how we view interest rates and their effect on credit markets. Traditionally, we view higher interest rates as a net tightening and slowing of the…

I have spent some time this past weekend reading what investment manager Hugh Hendry has had to say about why he has turned bullish. And the clear takeaways are twofold. First, it is very difficult to ‘fight the Fed’ when it wants growth.…