Money and Finance
- Hussman Weekly Market Comment: The Outlook Will Shift As Conditions Shift
Our investment outlook will shift as market conditions shift, and we will lean toward a more constructive stance when conditions support it. There are straightforward ways to do that while still remaining careful about larger cyclical risks. Present conditions...
- John Mauldin: Time To Row, Or Sail?
A few weeks ago, Ed Easterling and I updated the work we published almost ten years ago about secular bear and bull markets in chapters 5 and 6 of Bull's Eye Investing. This week I am in Maine at the annual Shadow Fed fishing trip (for those of us...
- The Villain – By Roger Lowenstein
Found via ValueWalk. THE U.S. FEDERAL RESERVE was founded 99 years ago, as a bulwark to the banking system and an antidote to its frequent runs and panics. Strictly speaking, it was America’s third attempt at a central bank. The first, organized by...
- Video: Fed's Hoenig On Monetary Policy, U.s. Economy
Aug. 25 (Bloomberg) -- Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City President Thomas Hoenig talks with Bloomberg's Michael McKee about the Fed's ability to help the U.S. economy. Hoenig says there's a limit to how much more the central bank can do...
- Beware Those Who Think The Worst Is Past - By Carmen Reinhart And Vincent Reinhart
The landscape of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where central bankers gathered at their annual conference last week, is spectacular and forbidding. Jagged peaks and vast empty spaces stretch across the horizon. For the attendees, however, it was both a vista...
Money and Finance
The Fed Chairman Is Not Always the Key Speaker at Jackson Hole - By Frank Martin
Found via Santangel’s Review.
If you hung on the words of Ben Bernanke at the August 31, 2012 Jackson Hole Symposium, you may have listened to the wrong speaker – or perhaps chosen the wrong time – if you were looking for clues about whether the markets for risk assets are trading at more or less than what they are intrinsically worth.
Two years earlier, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, nestled in Wyoming’s Grand Tetons, was just another cozy mountain resort and conference center. The annual gathering of central bankers and academics had drifted from place to place until the promoters discovered that a crowd-drawing luminary like Paul Volcker could be induced to participate because of his recreational passion for, of all things… trout fishing. But in 2010, Jackson Hole was the location chosen by Fed Chairman Bernanke to famously promise, in so many words, that he would induce another rally in the markets in risk assets through a second round of quantitative easing. And in truth, QE2 was spectacularly successful if measured by the 28% advance in the S&P 500 (an index of 500 stocks weighted by market value, considered widely held, and therefore thought to be representative of the stock market as a whole).
However, the most prophetic and yet simultaneously reviled (or simply ignored) speech at Jackson Hole came five years earlier, on August 27, 2005. That was two years before the global financial system began the meltdown that is to some extent contained today only because of ongoing massive infusions of liquidity. The speaker during the otherwise upbeat celebration of Alan Greenspan’s larger-than-life career was a then obscure University of Chicago professor and former director of the IMF’s research department. Raghuram G. Rajan’s words were considered apostasy by many attendees, leaving Larry Summers livid. Rajan had dared pose the question, “Has Financial Development Made the World a Riskier Place?”
…..
Fast-forward to August 31, 2012. On that day when Ben Bernanke delivered his Jackson Hole assurances to a world of investors hanging on his every word, another speaker from a different central bank delivered a message that nearly slipped through the cracks. Were it not for the keen eye of one reporter, Jason Zweig of the Wall Street Journal, about whose thoughtful work on behavioral economics I’ve written frequently, the speech may never have seen the light of day. Even though he did not arrive at the podium accompanied by drum rolls, Andy Haldane, Executive Director for financial stability at the Bank of England, is not a man who should be taken lightly. Unfortunately, even the intriguing title, “The Dog and the Frisbee,” was not bait enough to hold the attention of an audience for which a presentation on the application of complexity theory to regulatory oversight was simply … too complex.
- Hussman Weekly Market Comment: The Outlook Will Shift As Conditions Shift
Our investment outlook will shift as market conditions shift, and we will lean toward a more constructive stance when conditions support it. There are straightforward ways to do that while still remaining careful about larger cyclical risks. Present conditions...
- John Mauldin: Time To Row, Or Sail?
A few weeks ago, Ed Easterling and I updated the work we published almost ten years ago about secular bear and bull markets in chapters 5 and 6 of Bull's Eye Investing. This week I am in Maine at the annual Shadow Fed fishing trip (for those of us...
- The Villain – By Roger Lowenstein
Found via ValueWalk. THE U.S. FEDERAL RESERVE was founded 99 years ago, as a bulwark to the banking system and an antidote to its frequent runs and panics. Strictly speaking, it was America’s third attempt at a central bank. The first, organized by...
- Video: Fed's Hoenig On Monetary Policy, U.s. Economy
Aug. 25 (Bloomberg) -- Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City President Thomas Hoenig talks with Bloomberg's Michael McKee about the Fed's ability to help the U.S. economy. Hoenig says there's a limit to how much more the central bank can do...
- Beware Those Who Think The Worst Is Past - By Carmen Reinhart And Vincent Reinhart
The landscape of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where central bankers gathered at their annual conference last week, is spectacular and forbidding. Jagged peaks and vast empty spaces stretch across the horizon. For the attendees, however, it was both a vista...