We are at a critical moment in the history of politics and markets. Everyday the U.S. government stares into the fiscal and monetary abyss and chucks trillions in hoping that will be enough to finally fill it. We stand by hoping that it will work to reflate markets collapsing from a catastrophic mispricing of assets….
“We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself,” tweeted the president on Sunday night, adding that, after the current 15-day shutdown, “we will make a decision as to which way we want to go.” President Trump is said to be privately expressing a deepening concern at the damage the coronavirus shutdown is…
Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad” You can taste the fear as global central banks panic and introduce emergency measures to prevent a systemic collapse of the global financial system. On Sunday the U.S. Federal Reserve launched another financial bazooka at stock and bond markets when it announced the start of…
A recent BBC News article asked the quite pertinent question of whether U.S. politics is “beyond repair”. The points that the writer Nick Bryant makes regarding political “hyperpartisanship”, what he terms “the degradation of debate” and the corruption of both major political parties on the electoral front are quite valid, but fail to get to…
Historically the greatest economic depressions have started with unexpected events on the periphery of major financial markets. That was the case in May 1931 with the surprise collapse of the Austrian Creditanstalt Bank in Vienna which brought the entire fragile banking system of postwar Germany down with it, triggering the Great Depression in the United…
“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future,” Yogi Berra reminded us. But on “The McLaughlin Group,” the TV talk show on which this writer has appeared for four decades, predictions are as mandated as was taking Latin in Jesuit high schools in the 1950s. Looking to 2020, this writer predicted that Donald Trump’s…
