Friday, September 10, 2021Volume 2, Issue 37 “You know, if baseball umpires were on the front page of the sports section every week, you’d know something was desperately wrong with the game.” — Jim Grant referring to central bankers Scandals that
Wednesday Links – June 23, 2021
Wednesday, June 23, 2021Volume 2, Issue 32 “Today is a milestone for me. In 2006, I pledged to distribute all of my Berkshire Hathaway shares – more than 99% of my net worth – to philanthropy. With today’s $4.1 billion distribution,
Pounds of Salt: The Fed’s Epistemic Arrogance
“The dots are not a great forecaster of future rate moves. And that’s not because—it’s just because it’s so highly uncertain. There is no great forecaster of the future—so dots to be taken with a big, big grain of salt.”
Bernanke Persists in ‘Pushing on a String’ With QE2
The mid-term election results appear to match what market participants expected in the days leading up to voting yesterday. We will refrain from political commentary other than to make the observation that there is a difference between “benign gridlock” when the country’s course is essentially sound and gridlock when our fiscal situation is heading for disaster — which to us seems more like a suicide pact than a political strategy. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve is set to announce the details of its second round of quantitative easing later today. QE2 is essentially a euphemism for printing money, which in our modern economy takes the form of the Federal Reserve buying treasury bonds of intermediate to long term maturities. Read this article for more commentary.
Roger Lowenstein: The Fed Should Burst Our Bubbles
Roger Lowenstein is the author of five books covering financial markets. His latest book, The End of Wall Street, was published in April. Mr. Lowenstein is also the author of an excellent biography on Warren Buffett written in 1995 which we reviewed previously. In an article for the Washington Post today, Mr. Lowenstein makes the case for more timely intervention by the Federal Reserve when financial market bubbles are forming. Read this article for a brief excerpt and more commentary.