The final quarter is often one of instant reinforcement of both winners and losers. How will it go this time, once the Fed has thrown the knucklebones? Will Evergrande’s partly politically-inspired demise be smoothly handled – if only in a manner that satisfies Xi’s insatiable lust for power? Will the Vaccine Wars further undermine social harmony and hinder economic progress? How will the burgeoning energy crisis – bastard child of misguided climate polcies – play out as winter approaches? All will be revealed in due course.
Category Archives: Energy
Most people associate ‘inflation’ with rising prices, but the disease goes much deeper than that. Inflation is a phenomenon wherein money becomes so abundant it disrupts relative price formation and hence interferes with the vital transmission of information about the state of the countless interactions of supply and demand, plenty and scarcity, which take place on the market. As the fever rises, mistakes accumulate, conflicts intensify, timings clash, finances become stretched, and coherence is lost. A rising price is one thing. Prices -plural- rising at varying speeds and in an ever less predictable manner is a much more dangerous pathology.
Though a lot of hot money was poured into the trade in the last quarter of 2020, there is still much reluctance on the part of economists – always prone to a spot of Under-consumption fallacy – to wholly embrace the idea that prices are beginning to rise and that the path ahead is likely to be an inflationary one. That path will inevitably not be smooth, nor its ascent uninterrupted, but it is hard to see where we slow the climb or take a different turning – or even that sufficient will exists to choose that alternative were it ever to come up on our satnav.
We ended the summer by saying that – barring another disastrous, COVID19-inspired, mass governmental embargo on everyday economic activity – the miners, makers, movers, and merchants of the things we need to run our lives when we are not scrolling through Instagram or pretending to pay attention to a yet another pointless Zoom conference would begin to make up ground lost in lockdown to the providers of such diversions. State interference would henceforth take other, more chronic forms of hindrance: tending deliberately to boost demand while making its satisfaction progressively more difficult. So far – broadly speaking – so good.
On the eve of what is shaping up to be a particularly momentous US election, we offer our view of what is at stake – both in the markets and out in the real world, far beyond the flickering screens of the trading room.
Since their Lockdown lows, commodities have performed as well as any other asset, though they still remain generally depressed. Can they now continue to rise?
Thanks very much to my old friend, Steve Sedgwick at Squawk Box Europe for the chat this morning. We looked at Growth v Value, the US v ROW, we touched on bonds and borrowing, money supply, inflation, lockdown, commodities & gold – all in under 10 minutes!
The so-called ‘war’ over trade being conducted by the US & China has given rise to much ill-informed commentary about its supposed benefits, its prospective victims, and China’s putative responses.
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?
Are equities ‘overpriced’ and if so, by how much? What about bonds or that largely forgotten asset-class, commodities? How do the three of them inter-relate and can we take advantage of such behaviour in order to build a better, more macro-resilient portfolio? We take a detailed look, here, in the presentation found by clicking on […]
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