Category Archive: 5) Global Macro

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Three Ways to Restore Housing Affordability

2025-02-28

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2025-02-28

The choice is simple: housing is either shelter for citizens, or it's just another interchangeable speculative asset in the global financialization casino. It can't be both.

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Weekly Market Pulse: Tune Out The Noise

2025-02-24

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2025-02-24

Okay, I confess. It was my fault. I decided to take a couple of days off. I took my eye off the ball and the stock market fell a quick 2% while I was relaxing, eating too much, and seeing some great art in the Holy City, Charleston, SC. I promise it won’t happen again, at least until my wife tells me where we’re going next. It is a running joke within Alhambra that every time I go away for a few days the market takes a hit. Of course, that isn’t...

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The Tax Benefits of Self-Employment

2025-02-20

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2025-02-20

Lowering one's tax burden is not the reason to pursue self-employment, but it is something worth understanding if you're exploring self-employment.

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Weekly Market Pulse: Is The Honeymoon Over Already?

2025-01-27

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2025-01-27

President Trump’s first week on the job was a good one for markets. The S&P 500 was up 1.75%, with tech stocks taking the lead as the President welcomed a group of leading technology CEOs to D.C. to announce big investments in AI.

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Is DeepSeek a Sputnik Moment?

2025-01-27

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2025-01-27

I'm not sure that "software will eat the world," but it could consume the stock market bubble in a single gulp.

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"Too Big to Care" and the Illusion of Choice

2024-12-30

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2024-12-30

In a functional economy with real competition and transparency, every one of these cartel-corporations would be driven out of business by their 'too big to care' incompetence.

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How Do We Fix the Collapse of Quality?

2024-11-20

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2024-11-20

Every product now has an "extended warranty" admission of the collapse of quality and durability. There's a great uplifting hope swirling around the potential to fix what's broken, and so here's my question: how do we fix the collapse of quality and durability that we now take for granted?

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Is Social Media Actually "Media," Or Is It Something Else?

2024-10-30

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2024-10-30

By placing search/social media in the bucket of newspapers, radio and TV networks, perhaps we've obscured their true nature as "Digital Marketing Mechanisms."

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Welcome to the Circular Firing Squad

2024-10-29

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2024-10-29

If you find my scribblings upsetting, there's an easy solution: stop reading it. We'll both benefit. I'm never more than one inch away from converting my site from essays to photos of kittens and puppies as the only means to gain respite from being hammered for my many failings as a human being.

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Can We Rein In the Excesses of Financialization Without Crashing the Economy?

2024-10-14

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2024-10-14

Or we can let the bubble implode under its own weight and have a plan ready to clean house when the dust settles.

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Weekly Market Pulse: Questions

2024-10-14

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2024-10-14

As we enter the final quarter of 2024, there are a lot of questions facing investors. There are, of course, always a lot of questions because investors are always dealing with the future, but today’s environment does seems to have more than usual.

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Why Political "Solutions" Don’t Fix Crises, They Make Them Worse

2024-10-02

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2024-10-02

The system has reached the limits of its adaptability. Everything else is entertainment. A great many people have immense faith in political solutions to looming crises: if only we elect new leaders, if only we replace current policies with new policies, everything would be fixed and the crises will all dissipate.

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How Easy Is It To Become Middle Class Now?

2024-09-27

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2024-09-27

If we want social / economic renewal, we have to make it straightforward for anyone willing to adopt the values and habits of "thrift, prudence, negotiation, and hard work" to climb the ladder to middle class security.

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So the Economy Now Depends on Stocks Which Depend on Front-Running the Fed–And This Is Fine?

2024-09-23

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2024-09-23

Is an economy based on the wealth effect generated by front-running the front-runners really that stable?

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Weekly Market Pulse: Did The Fed Just Make A Mistake?

2024-09-23

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2024-09-23

Well, they did it. The Fed cut the Fed Funds rate by 50 basis points last week and indicated that there is likely more to come. Stock investors liked it, bidding up small cap stocks (S&P 600) by 2.25%, large caps (S&P 500) by 1.4% and the NASDAQ by 1.5%.

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Weekly Market Pulse: It’s An Uncertain World

2024-09-03

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2024-09-03

You’re going to hear a lot of talk about the yield curve soon and what it means for “the” yield curve to uninvert (which isn’t a real word but will get used a lot). The difference between the 10-year Treasury note yield and the 2-year Treasury note yield is about to turn positive, the 2-year note yield recently falling a bit more rapidly than the 10-year.

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What If All the Conventional Models Fail to Predict What Happens Next?

2024-09-03

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2024-09-03

The 'novel, apocalyptic situation which has now arisen' goes largely unrecognized. A truly staggering quantity of content is aimed at predicting what happens next, a.k.a. the future, and justifies their prediction by referencing models that are presented as rock-solid predictive tools.

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Market Morsel: SLOOSing

2024-08-06

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2024-08-06

The Senior Loan Officer Survey came out yesterday and I’m sure you’ve been waiting on pins and needles, as I have, to see the results. Okay, maybe you had better things to do. I sure hope so because it isn’t exactly riveting.

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Q3 Cyclical Outlook

2024-06-25

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2024-06-25

Growth peaked on a quarter over quarter seasonally adjusted annual rate in Q3 last year at 4.9%. The preferred reading is on an annual basis where growth peaked in Q4 of last year at 3.13%. Growth in Q1 was 2.88% and growth in Q2 has risen some and is trending at right about 3%. 

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"Why Are You So Negative?" Good Question. Here’s the Answer: Real Life

2024-06-25

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2024-06-25

I think it's more productive to go with Plan B: set aside our emotions and reluctance and start doing the hard work of dealing with polycrisis.

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