Guild’s Basic Needs Index
Reality Bites — With a Vengeance
The broad markets have registered significant, but constrained, volatility thus far in 2022, with the S&P 500 down about 8% from last year’s highs as of this writing, and the NASDAQ 100 down about 14%. Those figures mask a different, deeper, and more systemically important reality that mark the current
The Markets This Week — March 3
Please join us for our periodic conference call at 10 AM Pacific on March 24, 2022 — there will be a lot to discuss, and we welcome your questions. We’ll discuss ways you can increase your liquidity, flexibility, and optionality as the world moves into a more volatile and unpredictable future.
Lithium: Lifeblood For a Wired World
Hydrocarbon energy sources, even though they’ve been sidelined by investors during the ESG craze, still power the world, and are still essential for industry’s functioning and consumers’ wellbeing. Overhasty calls for a total decarbonization are coming up against the hard limits of reality, as ideology usually does. Besides the potential
The Markets This Week — February 24
Vladimir Putin pulled the trigger and has begun an apparently full-scale attempt to occupy Ukraine — or at least enough of it to create a permanent instability that will forestall its accession to NATO. We have long identified this issue as the lynchpin of Russia’s policy in its “near abroad.”
The Markets This Week — February 17
Positive and Negative Psychology In the Markets While most economists don’t believe a recession is in the cards, on average, until 2025, many market participants are beginning to fear otherwise. Their fears focus on the Fed, which is increasingly seen to be so far behind the curve in addressing inflation
Stablecoins May Not Excite, But They Matter — A Lot
The Biden administration has engaged substantively on digital asset regulation. It is preparing an executive order, after input from various agencies, including the Financial Stability Oversight Council, which will set the stage for the development of a comprehensive digital asset strategy document later this year. The executive order will likely
Nuclear: The End of Europe’s Energy Nightmare?
Most observers would agree that Europe’s energy sector has reached a point of crisis. Political, geopolitical, and macroeconomic trends are colliding in a volatile mix that has led to significant price volatility and public anxiety. Gas has been a key culprit. Source: Jefferies Equity Research The forces that are at
The Markets This Week — 10 February 2022
Interest Rates, Inflation, and the Fed’s Coming Gut Check This morning’s CPI print hit 7.5% year-over-year, up 0.6% from the previous print, and slightly worse than expected. Some (not us) had believed that December’s number would be a peak; it was not. Given trajectories of energy and housing costs, February
Crypto Comments: Defi Hacks and Central Bank Digital Currencies
An Instructive DeFi Hack Last week, Qubit Finance, a defi (decentralized finance) project operating on the Binance Smart Chain, was hacked to the tune of $80 million — haplessly offering the anonymous hacker a $2 million reward to “do the right thing” and return the funds. (He hasn’t done so
The Markets This Week — 3 February 2022
Tactical Shifts Bring Improvement U.S. markets — stocks, bonds, and real estate — are all still very much in the process of digesting the arrival of higher rates. The recent respite from volatility may have had something to do with technical factors. First, managers who harvested losses at the end
The Markets This Week: The Fed’s Signals Trump Good Earnings
How To Understand Current Volatility, and What To Expect Markets are beginning to digest the arrival of higher rates and the start of the Fed’s balance-sheet runoff. Even more than usual, there is a host of cross-currents influencing markets as the aftershocks of the pandemic continue to reverberate through the
Interest Rates, Inflation, and Earnings: What Matters Most?
This past weekend we were invited to present our views on the current investment landscape to the local chapter of the American Association of Individual Investors (AAII). As our title indicates, there are many macro factors at work, all of them of fundamental interest to investors. How do we rank
GBNI Update
As we noted last week, our in-house real-world inflation indicator, the Guild Basic Needs Index, has cooled from last fall’s recent year-over-year high of 31.9%. It now stands at 23.7%. It’s down from the peak, as is to be expected as the pandemic wave recedes. What we think will be
The Markets This Week — 20 January
Above, we noted the potential political consequences of inflation. Certainly, inflation, and erosion of real wages, is a primary element in the electorate’s increasing dissatisfaction with the current administration. It is not the only one, however. In many metropolitan areas, including those that saw protests in favor of police reform
Commodities: Crosscurrents and Undertow
Another month, another blistering inflation report; the consumer price index rose at a 7% annual rate in December. Of course, as our regular readers have heard us say often, the methodology used to calculate that rate has changed often over the decades — invariably in a way that understates the
The Markets This Week — 13 January
Looming higher rates — and now, the looming run-off of the Fed balance sheet — have finally begun to penetrate market consciousness, with the result that the sell-off which had been happening “under the hood” spread more widely and visibly to the major indices. As usual, the median stock has
