The Unicorn-believing Bulls will need the financial equivalent of The Catch just to avoid being skunked.When I use the phrase Stupor Bowl, I refer not to the upcoming Super Bowl or the crazy mid-winter bicycle free-for-all in Minneapolis, but…
If the risk-on euphoria of punters borrowing billions of dollars in margin debt doesn’t materialize, stocks could languish for years after falling 50%.The financial service industry’s Prime Directive is to exploit humanity’s core drives of Greed and Fe…
Mankiw’s claim that college costs are the inevitable result of Baumol’s Disease is pure self-serving rubbish.Everyone who isn’t blinded by self-interest sees that the cost of higher education in America–and the way we pay for it, by turning students i…
Once the power to manage expectations has been lost, the central bank bag of tricks is empty.No one knows precisely how and when the global unraveling will impact their corner of the planet, but we do know one thing with absolute certainty: central ban…
Virtually every major program of every major nation-state is financially unsustainable going forward.Though triage is typically used in a medical setting, we are entering an era when financial triage will increasingly be necessary o…
This erosion of a self-employed, independent middle class was an important pre-condition for the collapse of Rome and the French Revolution.I have devoted many blog posts to the erosion of the middle class, for the specific reason that when the mi…
Who’s going to buy the tens of millions of empty flats held as investments?I’ve been writing a lot about China recently because it’s becoming increasingly clear that China’s economy is slowing and the authority’s “fixes” are not turning it around. That…
We want this time to be different so badly, we can almost taste it.If you visit San Francisco, you will find it difficult to walk more than a few blocks in central S.F. without encountering a major construction project. It seems that every decrepi…
All the phantom wealth piled up in China’s boost phase is now melting down, and the China Syndrome will trigger a meltdown in global phantom assets.The 1979 film The China Syndrome took its name from the darkly humorous notion that a nuc…
This week I am addressing themes I see playing out in 2016. A number of systemic, structural forces are intersecting in 2016. One is the failure of high finance to fix the global economy’s systemic problems.The operative conceit of the past 7 years has…