"Last year’s unusual deleveraging in NYSE margin accounts in a strong equity year, coupled with the unusual selling of equity funds, raise the possibility that retail investors are more motivated by rebalancing rather than responding to long-term momentum." - JPMorgan
"If the banks are not benefitting, who is? Leverage funds with huge interest rate derivative positions. And who is on the hook if they blow up? The big banks who are on the other side of the trade, as they would be forced to recapitalize the clearinghouses."
"What we do not know for sure is whether there comes a point well before 100% of all investing is done passively, or before all public equity is taken private, that the market price becomes meaningless."
"Expanded trade with China in the 2000s contributed to the loss of tens of thousands of American factories and millions of manufacturing jobs and the hollowing out of many communities. What followed was an associated rise in the rates of divorce, drug addiction, crime, depression and death."
If the size of reserves, rather than the balance sheet, is a better measure of policy support, fundamentals have even less time to pick up, and the current earnings season becomes more important.
...we should not underestimate how the Fed’s response to Black Monday ushered in a new era of investor confidence in the central bank’s ability to control market downturns...
In the decade ahead, demographic realities will catch up to China and the West, and the world will need a productivity miracle to offset the effects...
As China and Russia work ever harder to undermine the dollar and its geopolitical position, small countries like Iran will become even more important in the US's drive to maintain the dollar's status quo...
