Tag Archives: newsletter

The post-COVID inflation surge that was supposed to be “transitory” is looking a lot more permanent. On Friday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis Friday released data on Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE), the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge. “The PCE price index for August increased 4.3 percent from one year ago, reflecting increases in both goods and services,” according to the report. “Energy prices increased 24.9 percent and food prices increased...

The weather was favourable for Swiss farmers last year Keystone / Sigi Tischler Covid, the weather and the pig market were kind to farmers in 2020, with income increasing 6.7% compared with 2019. But this year is looking much bleaker. The average income last year was CHF79,200 ($85,500) per farm, CHF5,000 more than the year before, Agroscope, the Swiss federal body for agriculture research, said on TuesdayExternal link. Given that there are an average of 1.35 family...

On September 6, 2021, the city-state of Berlin, Germany’s capital, held a referendum: voters in Berlin had to decide whether thousands of housing units owned by “large real estate firms” should be nationalized. 56.4 percent voted yes, 39 percent no. While the referendum is not binding, it forces Berlin’s incoming city government to debate the expropriation measure. However, whichever way you look at it, it certainly is an expropriation attempt: the term...

Last night, Autodata reported its first estimates for September auto sales in the US. According to its own as well as those compiled by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (the same government outfit which keeps track of GDP), vehicle sales have been sliding overall ever since April. For a couple months in the middle of Uncle Sam’s helicopter-fed frenzy, the number of vehicle units had surged to a high of more than 18 million (seasonally-adjusted annual rate) in both...

Credit Suisse says police raids were not targeted at the bank itself. Keystone-sda-ats Ag Switzerland Swiss police have raided the offices of Credit Suisse and seized documents relating to the collapse of its $10bn fund range linked to Greensill Capital. The police searches were conducted at the request of Zürich’s cantonal public prosecutor earlier this week. The prosecutor has opened a criminal investigation into Greensill’s activities and the way in which Credit...

Can you remember back to when you were two or three years old? Toddlers often think that there are little people inside the TV (or maybe this was only true when the TV was about as deep as it was wide—and maybe kids today don’t think this when looking at a 60-inch flatscreen…) Anyways, it’s normal to grow out of this naïve view of television. No one believes it past the age of eight, much less into adulthood. Purchasing Power and Intrinsicism This is a simple...

The vast majority of market participants are about as ready for a semi-random “volatility event” as the dinosaurs were for the meteor strike that doomed them to oblivion. Judging by euphoric gambler–oops I mean “investor”–sentiment and measures of volatility, risk of a market drop has been near-zero for the past 18 months. But risk was never actually low, it was only hidden. When it emerges, it’s a surprise only to those who mistakenly thought risk had vanished. As...

It’s now been more than eighteen months since governments began the new social experiment now known as “lockdowns.” Prior to 2020, forced “social distancing” was generally considered to be too costly in societal terms to justify such a risky experiment. Yet in 2020, led by health technocrats at the World Health Organization, nearly all national governments in the world suddenly and without precedent embraced the idea of lockdowns. On the other hand, the Swedish...

US factories are humming along, constrained only by supply issues which might occasionally limit production. That’s the story, anyway. There’s too much business because of them, manufacturers taking in only more orders by the day leaving them struggling to catch up. But what kind of stuff is it that is being ordered from our nation’s factories? Without thinking too much about it, you’d probably say that they’re ridiculously busy trying as best as possible to fill...

ASSET ALLOCATION We maintain our tactically neutral position on equities, with the notable exception of Japan, where we see scope for a re-start to Abenomics and for Japanese stocks to continue to close their performance gap with their peers in other developed markets. Though recourse to options trades, we are prepared for an increase in volatility as markets adjust to slowing growth momentum. While they may consolidate in the short term, we remain broadly optimistic...