The cycle of monetary tightening has been ongoing in various forms for over five years. First came Bernanke’s taper warning in May 2013. Next came the actual taper in December 2013 that ran until November 2014. Then came the removal of forward guidance in March 2015, the liftoff in rates in December 2015, four more
I haven’t had as much to say about bitcoin lately as I did late in 2017 and earlier this year. I was not surprised when bitcoin surged to $20,000; that’s how bubbles work. I was even less surprised when it plunged over 65% to about $6,000 in the first quarter of 2018. That’s the
One of the first things I learned as a registered Washington lobbyist, (yes, I admit it, I was a lobbyist in the 1990s), is “you can’t be something with nothing.” That’s a Washington insider’s way of saying that if you don’t like an opponent’s policies, it’s not enough to moan and complain about them and
I’m more of a fundamental and macro analyst than a technical analyst, but I do pay attention to charts and patterns. Charts have low predictive value in my view, but they are information-rich and are great tools for examining multiple data sets in one glance. It’s not news that gold has been trading in a
If you have defective and obsolete models, you will produce incorrect analysis and bad policy every time. There’s no better example of this than the Federal Reserve. The Fed uses equilibrium models to understand an economy that is not an equilibrium system; it’s a complex dynamic system. The Fed uses the Phillips Curve to
