The price of everything

Alternative views

“The good news is that we know what is coming next. The bad news is that we know what is coming next. The current war on deflation, a war lost if the shift in bond yields is to be believed, is bringing forth from the authorities not a new tactic but a whole new strategy - financial repression.. So, is the financial repression, now renamed modern monetary theory/makeup strategy/nominal GDP targeting, imminent as bond yields in New Zealand and Australia reach all-time lows and the ten-year bond yields of both Japan and Germany return to zero ?”

• Russell Napier, introducing the latest Solid Ground

 

One of the many joys of unshackling yourself from the confines of the mainstream media is that you get to hear interesting, intriguing and thought-provoking perspectives, in a long-form format. Two cases in point: Dominic Frisby and Rory Sutherland, both of whom can be heard in recent interviews here. (There’s a rich archive, too.)

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EUnola May

• With apologies to Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and their 1980 hit Enola Gay.

 

EUnola May

You should have stayed at home yesterday

Oh-oh it can’t describe

The feeling and the way you lied.

These games you play

They’re gonna end it all in tears someday.

Oh-oh EUnola May

It shouldn’t ever have to end this way.

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Trend following

The good folk at Absolute Return Partners have identified eight megatrends, long-term investment themes that they believe will define the world of the future. Those themes are:

1) The end of the debt super-cycle

2) The retirement of the baby-boomers

3) The declining spending power of the middle classes

4) The rise of the East

5) Mean reversion of wealth-to-GDP

6) Disruption

7) Running out of fresh water

8) Electrification of everything..

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Don’t be so negative

“FED’S WILLIAMS SAYS IN A DOWNTURN WE COULD CONSIDER QUANTITATIVE EASING, NEGATIVE RATES.”

• Tweet by Reuters’ Jennifer Ablan, reporting on a speech by John Williams of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York at the Economic Club of New York, 6 March 2019.

 

“Because NIRP worked so well in Europe and Japan ?”

• Response by mac on Twitter.

 

In February 2016, The Financial Times published an article titled ‘Central Banks: Negative Thinking’, co-authored by Robin Wigglesworth, Leo Lewis and Dan McCrum. The piece in question was atypically sceptical of the received wisdom of QE, i.e., that it works. If it was sceptical as to the efficacy of QE, it was doubly so in relation to the policy of maintaining negative interest rates, or NIRP..

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