Reports

Philosophers and analysts use a principle called Occam’s Razor (sometimes Ockham’s Razor) to solve difficult problems. It says that when you are confronted with two possible solutions to a problem, one complicated and one simple, it’s usually better to select the simple solution. There’s always some attraction to the complicated ...

The setting: Beijing, 1971. The characters: United States National Security Advisor Hank Kissinger and Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai. They are discussing diplomacy. At one point a pause broke their conversation. Mr. Kissinger then solicited his host’s estimate of the French Revolution’s impact upon the world. “Too early to say,” came ...

Mr. Donald Trump is archvillain to some. He is archangel to others. He is neither to us. Yet we might etch his likeness into Rushmore — for one central reason. What is it? Is it his tariffs? His tax reductions and deregulation? His vastly accelerated vaccine debuts? His judicial nominees ...

I’ve made many visits to China over the past thirty years and have been careful to move beyond Beijing (the political capital) and Shanghai (the financial capital) on these trips. My visits have included Chongqing, Wuhan (the origin of the coronavirus outbreak), Xian, Nanjing, new construction sites to visit “ghost ...

1: The stock market is deliriously overvalued by history’s standards… 2: Investors fully acknowledge 1… 3: Investors continue to pile into the stock market despite 1. Conclude the gentlemen and ladies of Bespoke Investments: “Investors simultaneously think the market is overvalued but likely to keep climbing.” Natixis Investment Managers adds ...

Gold’s recent selloff looked familiar in that it resembled the types of gold selloffs that occurred when the Fed talked about tightening its loose policy for years in the mid-2010s. It sure talked a good game. But, when it came time to really test how much tightening the debt-saturated economy ...

We have a fine-sounding word for running with the herd: momentum. When the herd is running, those who buy what the herd is buying and sell what the herd is selling are trading momentum, which sounds so much more professional and high-brow than the noisy, dusty image of large mammals ...

As my readers know, I don’t like to get into politics in my analyses; I cover economics and capital markets. That said, there are times when politics are so focused and powerful that we have to pay attention because the impact on markets will be enormous. This could be one ...

Since the word inflation is so loaded, let’s use the more neutral (and more accurate) term, decline in purchasing power: an hour of your labor buys fewer goods and services of lesser quality than it did a decade ago or a generation ago. While the conventional discussion focuses on monetary ...

I’ve written for years about different nations’ persistent efforts to dethrone the U.S. dollar as the leading global reserve currency and the main medium of exchange. At the same time, I’ve said that such processes don’t happen overnight;  instead, they happen slowly and incrementally over decades. The dollar displaced sterling ...