The law of unintended consequences is becoming ever more prominent in the economic sphere, as the world becomes exponentially more complex with every passing year. Just as a network grows in complexity and value as...
Apr 28 – John Mauldin, Chairman of Mauldin Economics, talks about the “Economic Singularity” and the timeline for when he thinks large unpayable debts around the globe finally come home to roost. He also discusses...
I can sense a growing unease as I talk with investors and other friends, from professional market watchers and traders to casual observers. What in the Wide World of Sports is going on? It is not just that markets are...
All eyes are focused on Europe this week as another Greek drama plays itself out. I have to admit that in my student days I was forced to sit through a number of Greek dramas, which are admittedly a fine part of...
There is an old story about a beautiful peasant girl named Layla, who was passing through a farmland while going to another village. There was a man offering his prayers out in the open. The custom was that no one should cross in front...
Here are my 15 surprises for 2015 (with a strategy that might be employed in order for an investor to profit from the occurrence of these possible improbables): Surprise No.1 – Faith in central bankers is tested (stocks sink and gold soars)...
With two reports a day, and often more, readers sometimes complain that keeping tabs on the thoughts of the various Gavekal analysts can be a challenge. So as the year draws to a close, it may be helpful if we recap the main questions confronting investors and the themes we strongly believe in, region by region.
Hyun Song Shin, who is on leave from Princeton while chief economist at the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, spends a lot of time wondering what could cause the next financial crisis. He suspects it will be something different from the leveraged bets on housing that were at the root of the last crisis.
Russia and its redoubtable president, Vladimir Putin, have been much in the news lately. The latest flurry came when Putin was taken out behind the woodshed at the G20 conference in the Philippines last weekend over his recent moves to inject more Russian troops and arms into Ukraine.
The story of energy is the story of human expansion. From the days when we roamed the African savanna, we tamed first fire and then other forms of energy, using them as tools to control our environment and improve our lives. The control of energy has always been at the heart of the human story.
Regulatory capture – when regulators come to act mainly in the interest of the industries they regulate – is a phenomenon that economists, political scientists, and legal scholars have been writing about for decades.
Let me admit up front that this EVA has been rolling around in my mind for quite awhile. Its genesis may be directly related to the fact that I’ve been desperately yearning to write a bullish EVA — besides on Canadian REITs or income securities that get trounced by the Fed’s utterances.
The United States is just starting to think about the upcoming elections (for whatever reason, the vast majority of people don’t focus on politics until after Labor Day), but there is another election happening “over the pond,”...
Every year, the Manpower Group, a human resources consultancy, conducts a worldwide “Talent Shortage Survey.” Last year, 35% of 38,000 employers reported difficulty filling jobs due to lack of available talent; in the U.S., 39% of employers did.
This past week several reports came across my desk highlighting both the good news and the bad news about the future of automation and robotics. There are those who think that automation and robotics are going to be a massive destroyer of jobs and others who think...
Growing geopolitical risk is on everyone’s mind right now, but in today’s Outside the Box, Michael Cembalest of J.P. Morgan Asset Management leads off with a helpful reminder: the only time since WWII that...
Inflation is a much misunderstood phenomenon. Most people assume that a CPI rate of 10% means that most prices are rising by a similar amount. In reality, some prices may be falling even while others soar.
The challenge for the ECB is how to take the edge off a still-overvalued euro — it is already down about four full figures on the ‘talk’, but at 1.36 versus the U.S. dollar it still has at least 15 figures to go the downside just to hit its fair-value line (this will need a Draghi ‘walk’ which would finally quash the deflation pressure...
When Gary Shilling was with us here last fall, he and I were feeling considerably more sanguine about the near-term propects for the US and global economies. In fact, I said about Gary that “that old confirmed bear is waxing positively bullish about the future prospects of the US. In doing so he mirrors my own views.”
We have liberals and progressives who use data to demonstrate the correlation between income inequality and recessions or slow growth and then erroneously equate correlation with causation. I think we have sufficiently shown the absurdity of their conclusions.
