It's Coming...
If you’re managing money and need positive results in the year ahead, you’re in a tough spot. Stocks are at levels that in the past have preceded cycle-ending crashes while high-grade bonds yield virtually nothing but could easily produce big capital losses if interest rates rise even a little. What do you do? Retire, if […]
Global stock (and bond and real estate) markets have been on a tear this year, apparently in anticipation of three big events. And last week they got them all, sort of: The US and China announced a “trade deal” that is flimsy but a deal nonetheless; the Fed promised to refrain from raising rates until […]
Criticizing the “public sector” is tricky, because teachers, firefighters, cops and bus drivers are by-and-large great people doing hard things that benefit the rest of us. But there’s this problem, which is that once a country’s public sector grows beyond a certain size, it takes on a life of its own, demanding more resources even […]
People have been talking about a “debt bubble” for some years now. They’ve been right, of course, based on the combination of surging borrowing and plunging rates. But the bubble hasn’t stopped inflating, and recently it entered what certainsly looks like a terminal blow-off stage. Some highlights: Though July, China’s total debt rose by $2 […]
One of the lessons of the past few decades’ boom/bust cycles is that each financial bubble emerges in a different asset class. In the 1970s it was precious metals, in the 1980s junk bonds, in the 1990s tech stocks and in the 2000s mortgage-backed bonds. Today the only one of these with a reasonable chance […]
There are trillions of dollars of bonds in the world with negative yields – a fact with which future historians will find baffling. Until now those negative yields have been limited to the safest types of bonds issued by governments and major corporations. But this week a new category of negative-yielding paper joined the party: […]
By now just about everyone understands what junk bonds are and why they matter. But there’s a non-publicly traded version of this kind of debt that’s also soaring and has recently caught the Fed’s eye. Called leveraged loans, these are loans made by banks to companies with weak balance sheets – defined as debt exceeding […]
Not so long ago, London Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard was one of the handful of must-read financial journalists. He probably still is, but since he disappeared behind the Telegraph’s pay wall his work is invisible to non-subscribers, only emerging when a free outlet runs one of his stories. That happened this morning when the Sydney Morning […]
The era of fiat currencies and central bank printing presses has desensitized us to massive leverage and its implications. So when it is reported, for instance, that China‘s private sector borrowing has risen to levels that are unprecedented in financial history, this is greeted with a collective yawn. It shouldn’t be, though, because no society […]
Everyone has been there: Times are good for a while and it starts to seem reasonable to buy – or agree to – things you want but don’t need. Later on, when money gets a little tighter, you start prioritizing and realize you really didn’t need the leased Mercedes or the McMansion with all those […]
When you see that Italy’s debt is rising, the logical question is, who the hell is dumping good money after bad into such an obviously failed state? The answer is that by lending money to Italy (or Greece, Portugal, Spain, or France) you’re really lending money to Germany, since the latter will have to bail […]
The key insight of the Austrian School of Economics (maybe the key insight of ALL economics) is that the amount you borrow matters, but so does the use to which you put the money. A case in point is US corporate debt, which has changed structurally lately in very scary ways. The short version of […]
We Baby Boomers timed it perfectly. We came of age during in an era of plentiful jobs and relatively high wages. Public pensions were generous. Stock, bond and home prices were low, and have since risen strongly, enriching anyone who managed to save regularly. College was (by current standards) insanely cheap, allowing us to upgrade […]
The past few years have seen more than the usual amount of political upheaval. But, interestingly, most regime changes have resulted in pretty much the same thing: Higher government spending and bigger deficits. Apparently the only “reforms” today’s voters will accept – which is to say the only actions that don’t get a leader kicked […]
There are two ways of looking at the intersection of debt and population. One way says that if debt is rising population should also rise to allow future workers to pay for the retirement of today’s. More people thus make debt easier to manage. The other point of view is that debt and population soaring […]
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