As promised, in this episode of Cantillon Effects, I have considered in much more detail whether there is such a thing as a ‘Consumer’ in isolation? I ask if a person’s role as producer is not more important. I look at the part played by interest rates, capital, and entrepreneurs, as well as by the […]
Category Archives: Central banks
The phrase on everyone’s lips at the moment is ‘Yield Curve’ – largely for its supposedly unerring ability to predict a recession if not, as its most extreme devotees seem to imply, actually to cause one. But is that a valid interpretation of what is afoot in financial markets and does that jibe with how […]
As a way of providing easy access to most of the regular work we have published over the past two years – and hence to getting a feel for what we do and how we do it – please see here for a collection in PDF form, offered in reverse chronological order.
There must be something in the air this winter – something that is besides the whiff of climate cant and manufactured eco-hysteria emanating from Davos and all the other organs of bien pensanterie. For, everywhere you look, someone is going less than quietly insane, either cooking up or Swedish chef rehashing glaring errors of economic idiocy […]
In his recent posting on Linked In, entitled, ‘The death of macro-prudential’, Stuart Trow of the EBRD delivered a well-aimed broadside at the pitiable conduct of the Bank of England and elaborated on some of the malign consequences of its catalogue of errors. Without wishing to single him out unduly for criticism for a piece […]
Have we finally reached the high-water mark of the current bull run? Is all the good news in – and the last, most shaky, marginal buyer along with it, inveigled in by the bounce from February’s brief Vol-au-Vent? If so, what are the implications? Where are the trigger points? How will any weakness manifest itself?
Previously featured by the good folk at Real Vision, my look at how the narrative we construct around the events of the market is all important in determining how we react to it and, hence, what further ramifications these might involve.
Though we have come to look a little askance at the seemingly ubiquitous CAPE measure – not least because of its gratingly unnuanced adoption by the Permabears – we can still utilise it to derive some broad sense of the market’s status once we attempt to adjust it for what we see as two of […]
One of the prevailing stories which nervous market participants whisper to each other at bedtime involves the timely appearance of the Fairy God-mother, hastening to Earth from Tir Nan Og to launch another multi-trillion round of money-printing the instant that our over-inflated asset prices suffer any meaningful setback. This comforting narrative, however, presupposes three key […]
As the phenomenon which is Bitcoin continues its transition from the geek press, past the financial columns and onto the front-pages of the newspapers, a little sober reflection may be in order. Are its proponents’ claims justified when they tell us that, far from being yet another instance of the Madness of Crowds, it will […]