Dr. Haymond referred to the dollar as, “The cleanest dirty shirt,” in a comment on my last post (note the shameless plug). I think he is correct, and I have heard him use similar terminology before to refer to a variety of policies and institutions in our imperfect world. We may not have the best […]
Archives
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The Cleanest Dirty Shirt Is Still A Dirty Shirt
31 Dec 2020
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Low interest rates….forever?
10 Sep 2020
That’s my prediction. Yes I know, he who lives by the crystal ball eats lots of broken glass. Yet our national debt is exploding, and the deficit is only going to get bigger this year and subsequently (above and beyond the previously bad projections). So why wouldn’t interest rates rise with all this borrowing? Doesn’t […]
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Standard financial analysis suggests the value of any stock is equal to the present discounted value of its future earnings. Thus an increase in the price of any stock is due to either an increase in expected future earnings, or a reduction in expected future interest rates, or some combination thereof. With today’s close at […]
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Fed’s Monetary Guns Keep Coming Up Empty
16 Mar 2020
S&P futures are limit (5%) down this morning, meaning no trade can occur pre-market opening that is not above the 5% down, and one ETF that tracks the S&P 500 is down 9%, indicating the bear market is still alive and well. This despite the Federal Reserve bringing out the big guns on Sunday by […]
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Coronavirus and Financial Markets
02 Mar 2020
As I write this morning, markets (Dow Futures) are trending downward to open today by about 300 points, after going into correction (>10% down) territory in last week’s wild action. Mr. Trump is (once again) asking for the Fed to ride to the rescue. “This is something I think they should’ve done even beyond this […]
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We are at historically unprecedented times. Consider these facts: There are over $9T worth of government securities that are yielding negative nominal interest rates. That’s right, people are giving governments trillions of dollars with a guaranteed negative return. Hmmm. Many unicorns are losing money but still getting premium IPO prices. Lyft lost nearly $1B last […]
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The most important price in our economy is socialist, not capitalist. Bernie, you’ve already won!
20 Mar 2019
Yesterday I was teaching on money in macroeconomics, and we discussed how the Fed influences the whole complex of interest rates. That naturally led to the question, how does the Fed “know” what the right level of reserves are, what the correct Fed funds rate should be, etc. What we know for sure is that […]
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Weekly Sage #19: Irving Fisher
15 Mar 2019
The Weekly Sage hopes to regularly bring brief profiles of key contributors to thought and faith before a Christian audience for historical education and awareness of valuable resources. Irving Fisher “We have seen that all wealth and property imply prospective services or ‘desirable events.’ It is the desirability of these future expected services which gives […]
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The Weekly Sage hopes to regularly bring brief profiles of key contributors to thought and faith before a Christian audience for historical education and awareness of valuable resources. Sometimes history brings together a special combination of resources and people that form a center of intellectual influence. The Weekly Sage will occasionally consider such “Schools” together. […]
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Market Volatility Returns–the end of the Boom?
21 Nov 2018
The index of stock market volatility (one measure of market fear) has risen in the past week, concurrent with large absolute point swings (although relatively low on a percentage basis). Markets are not as volatile as they were in October, but clearly there are uncertain times ahead, and markets generally like certainty. There are so […]
Bert Wheeler
Jeff Haymond
Marc Clauson
Mark Caleb Smith
Tom Mach