Blog Posts

The labor market and stock market are linked and we’ll go through the basic implications of how and why it’s important. Basic overview When there is lots of labor market slack – i.e., high unemployment – policymakers have great incentives to stimulate the economy with lower interest rates and other monetary and fiscal easing measures, […]

Policymakers can get what they want, but only to a point. In this article we’ll explain how policymakers are constrained and what it means for markets. Where policymakers are constrained Central banks can do a good job of putting more money and credit into the markets. And, when combined with fiscal policymakers, they’re effective at […]

The credit impulse has been given a lot more attention over the past several years as a potential variable to include as part of a tactical asset allocation strategy. Traders have long known that credit creation is a big factor in what determines prices. The price of anything is the amount of money and credit […]

If you have a retirement portfolio, chances are it has a lot of equity exposure. Your biggest fear probably relates to the capital losses that could occur. Unlike your house, its value isn’t marked to market each day like the stocks you own, so the latter gets a lot more attention in terms of how […]

The US can always pay its bills because it has the power to “print” money. The Federal Reserve controls money creation in the US.  So even if the US has bad finances, as it does – i.e., it spends more than it earns and has more liabilities than assets – the country can always satisfy […]

Low interest rates throughout the developed world mean little to no return on cash or bonds. In fact, when the inflation rate exceeds the nominal return on a fixed-rate instrument, your spending power is actually declining. But there’s still widespread demand for liquid, reliable sources of return.  Bonds usually less volatile than stocks, often significantly […]

Bitcoin is well-known for its volatility. For example, in 2021 alone it more than doubled from January through the middle of April, then fell by more than 50 percent in the next three months before bouncing about 65 percent from July to August. Then it began treading water right around the $50,000 mark.   Bitcoin […]

We are in unique times in the markets given the current limitations of where we are in the economic cycle. We are in a situation where there is limited room with traditional monetary policy tools should the economy turn down. As covered in a different article, there are three main equilibriums that markets are always […]

Spread option betting can be an attractive strategy for traders who want to limit their risk relative to having positions in the underlying but also don’t want to pay the often large premiums associated with pure options bets.  Owning or shorting the underlying is a linear bet – it doesn’t protect you from the large […]

Tapering is the process of a central bank reducing its ownership of financial assets. It is sometimes called quantitative tightening (QT) or “rolling off its balance sheet”.  First, we’ll start with an overview of the circumstances behind tapering’s role in economic management (monetary policy).  Then we’ll move into the big picture forces of what major […]