October 28, 2022 By Steve Blumenthal "The next stage of the tightening cycle is likely to be an economic slowdown as policymakers work to bring inflation back to target." – Bob Prince, Co-CEO Bridgewater Associates The Fed is in the middle of a tightening cycle. In Bridgewater [...]Read More >

  October 21, 2022 By Steve Blumenthal "About a nanosecond after money and equity and debt were invented, the business of facilitating these transactions was invented. Today we call this business “Wall Street,” but of course it goes back thousands of years, way before there were things [...]Read More >

  October 14, 2022 By Steve Blumenthal "My biggest concern is that further tightening will test the fragilities of market plumbing," - Scott Minerd, Chairman of Guggenheim Investments and Guggenheim Partners Global CIO Fragilities indeed. During last week's team call, our debate [...]Read More >

  October 7, 2022 By Steve Blumenthal "All those factors that cause a bull market, they're not only stopping, they're reversing. We are in deep trouble. You don't even need to talk about Black Swans to be worried here. To me, the risk-reward of owning assets doesn't make a lot of [...]Read More >

September 30, 2022 By Steve Blumenthal "Bull markets are born on pessimism, grow on skepticism, mature on optimism and die in euphoria." - Sir John Templeton Grab a stiff drink and feign a smile; the technicals are not looking so good. The S&P is headed for a third straight quarterly loss, [...]Read More >

September 23, 2022 By Steve Blumenthal "Earnings don't move the overall market; it's the Federal Reserve Board... focus on the central banks, and focus on the movement of liquidity... most people in the market are looking for earnings and conventional measures. It's liquidity that moves [...]Read More >

September 16, 2022 By Steve Blumenthal "The process starts with inflation. Then it goes to interest rates, then to other markets, and then to the economy." - Ray Dalio, Founder, Co-Chief Investment Officer, and Member of the Bridgewater Board The process is in motion. Over the last several [...]Read More >

September 9, 2022 By Steve Blumenthal “I fish to scratch the surface of those mysteries, for nearness to the beautiful, and to reassure myself the world remains.” - Carl Safina The islands of Haida Gwaii, formerly known as the Queen Charlotte Islands, sit in the northern Pacific, off the coast [...]Read More >

Aug 26, 2022 By Steve Blumenthal "Anyone who thinks there’s a formula for investing that guarantees success (and that they can possess it) clearly doesn’t understand the complex, dynamic, and competitive nature of the investing process." – Howard Marks, Oaktree Capital Group, LLC A short post [...]Read More >

Aug 19, 2022 By Steve Blumenthal "The Federal Reserve Acts were created to make the central bank of the United States a lender of last resort, not spender of last resort, a role Chair Powell confirmed in announcing the pandemic response program April 9, 2020.” – Dr. Lacy Hunt, Hoisington Research [...]Read More >

Aug 12, 2022 By Steve Blumenthal "U.S. consumers were soaking up all the cheap stuff the world had to offer: the asset rich, benefiting from decades of QE, bought high-end stuff from Europe produced using cheap Russian gas, and lower-income households bought all the cheap stuff coming from China. [...]Read More >

Aug 5, 2022 By Steve Blumenthal "MP3 reflationary policies injected massive amounts of money and credit into economies, leading to self-reinforcing high nominal growth, leading to self-reinforcing inflation, leading to an abrupt shift in market discounting from a benign monetary policy to a [...]Read More >

July 29, 2022 By Steve Blumenthal “The Yellen Fed was peak Fed. Peak, not in the sense of maximum balance sheet expansion, but in the sense of maximum faith and maximum zealotry that the Fed’s three toolboxes—short-term interest rates, balance sheet operations, and communication policy—could [...]Read More >

July 22, 2022 By Steve Blumenthal “Because most everyone wants most everything to go up and because there is a drug called credit that produces both upswings and a byproduct depressant called debt, there is a cycle of accumulating debt liabilities and debt assets that is followed by the reducing [...]Read More >

July 15, 2022 By Steve Blumenthal “From 2008 until recently the Federal Reserve and other central banks kept interest rates abnormally low. They did this because it is the time-honored central bank playbook. Make borrowing cheap and you can generate the kind of economic activity that spurs [...]Read More >