April 19, 2019 By Steve Blumenthal “Peace is its own reward.” - Mahatma Gandhi This week’s post is holiday-weekend short. Grab that coffee and find your favorite chair. You’ll find a simple chart that shows the history of cyclical bull and bear markets (with returns before and after inflation). [...]Read More >

April 12, 2019 By Steve Blumenthal "The economy is a collection of emotions." - Kenneth Langone Speaking to first-year NYU medical students, Kenneth G. Langone and his wife, Elaine, stepped to the podium. Their announcement shook the room. “From this point on, NYU Medical School is tuition-free [...]Read More >

April 5, 2019 By Steve Blumenthal “Meanwhile, over the past 10 years, low interest rates meant that we kept bringing tomorrow’s growth forward to today. Unfortunately, we may now have run out of tomorrow’s growth, and are about to start to regret eating today’s growth yesterday.” – [...]Read More >

March 29, 2019 By Steve Blumenthal "There's a lot of reasons to think that it has been a recession predictor for reasons in the past that kind of don't apply today." – John Williams, President and CEO, Federal Reserve Bank of New York Is it different this time? Williams is saying yes. The bond [...]Read More >

March 22, 2019 By Steve Blumenthal “This U-Turn on nothing fundamentally changing is unprecedented. Three months ago, we were on ‘autopilot’ with the balance sheet and now the bond market is priced for a rate cut this year. The reversal in their stance is stunning.” - Jeffrey Gundlach CEO, [...]Read More >

March 15, 2019 By Steve Blumenthal “Business cycles are a type of fluctuation found in the aggregate economic activity of nations that organize their work mainly in business enterprises: a cycle consists of expansions occurring at about the same time in many economic activities, followed by [...]Read More >

March 8, 2019 By Steve Blumenthal “To refer to a personal taste of mine, I’m going to buy hamburgers the rest of my life. When hamburgers go down in price, we sing the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ in the Buffett household. When hamburgers go up in price, we weep. For most people, it’s the same with [...]Read More >

March 1, 2019 By Steve Blumenthal “Optimism is highly valued, socially and in the market; people and firms reward the providers of dangerously misleading information more than they reward truth tellers. One of the lessons of the financial crisis that led to the Great Recession is that there are [...]Read More >

February 22, 2019 By Steve Blumenthal “The markets believed in December that the Fed was on the precipice of making a huge policy error – and the central bank pulled back.  End of story… From my lens, the Fed had already overtightened and recession risks for this year are elevated and on the [...]Read More >

February 15, 2019 By Steve Blumenthal "We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness." - Daniel Kahneman It’s been a fantastic equity market rally but keep your lights on, from a statistical perspective, odds favor a retest of the December low. I came across the [...]Read More >

February 8, 2019 By Steve Blumenthal “He went from being “Pragmatic Powell” to a “Powell Put.” But I do worry about people buying the dip because it does remind me a little of how the credit crisis developed with sub-prime starting to crack in 2007 it cracked down to $80 and people bought that [...]Read More >

February 1, 2019 By Steve Blumenthal “It's 'pretty obvious' the Fed is moving to the whims of the markets.” - Art Cashin Managing Director, Director of Floor Operations UBS Financial Services Inc. “It is impossible for Jay Powell to be more dominated by market-world than he is today. Even in [...]Read More >

January 25, 2019 By Steve Blumenthal “More money than fools or more fools than money. When there is more money than fools asset prices go up. When there are more fools than money, asset prices go down.” – Louis-Vincent Gave, Founding Partner & CEO, Gavekal Research At last March’s Mauldin [...]Read More >

January 18, 2019 By Steve Blumenthal “Overoptimism and overconfidence are two well-known psychological traits of our species. They are particularly dangerous in the late stages of an economic cycle where these terrible twins result in investors overestimating return and underestimating risk – a [...]Read More >

January 11, 2019 By Steve Blumenthal [Trump tweets, Xi Jinping, Global debt, the ECB Greenspan Put and Powell QT, He won’t do the same damn thing] "We didn’t start the fire It was always burning Since the world’s been turning We didn’t start the fire No we didn’t light it But we tried to [...]Read More >