What funny times in which we live; an observation perhaps highly dependent upon your notion of fun. Maybe curious is the better description. Daunting? Frightening? Opaque and unknowable? All probably good descriptions. True of politics. True of business.
Sticking to business, it’s hard to get conviction around anything right now. Nonetheless, we must. Everyone needs
It’s Golden Turkey Awards Time, Folks!
Our Turkeys are a little late this year but hey, we’ve been busy worrying about the collapse of the world’s economy. This is the 10th edition of our Turkeys and much thanks to our disorderly, often dysfunctional, regularly inscrutable and absurd government, polity and marketplace for continuing to
I’m back from vacation in the English countryside, away from the hurly burly of life in our capital markets. While I tried hard not to obsess on the news whilst away, bad news has a way of slithering into your peripheral vision, doesn’t it (I stuck to the English papers which are great fun, and are way better than ours… “Emergency biscuits flow into UK due to national shortages”)?
Continue Reading My Hair Is Not on Fire…Yet
We certainly have an abundance of bad bits and bobs out there right now, don’t we? War, pestilence, chubby dictators with rockets, buff dictators without souls, miscellaneous threats to world peace. It’s everywhere. Nonetheless, my take remains (see my prior blog, Prognosticator’s Regret) that, at least for our economy, all that doesn’t matter so much (how stupid does that sound?). It’s only through the transmission mechanism of monetary change that our economy is really impacted and regrettably, we’ve got that in full right now in the form of rapid, material inflation.
Continue Reading It’s the Inflation, Stupid
Welcome, dear reader, to our annual Golden Turkey Awards. But for my commitment to absolute fairness and concern over the appearance of impropriety, I would have awarded the first Golden Turkey Award to Dechert for actually getting the Golden Turkey Awards done this year. What a crazy year end. The market is insane.
On the other hand, while time is short, there’s plenty to bloviate about. I remember last year we were absolutely ready for the end of the Trump administration because the Biden administration promised a “dull is cool” vibe. Well, dull has been a failure. The farrago of lingering Covid, a return to something which is clearly not normalcy, but something new and with a pond full of black swans flopping around, it is not dull. So, how’s that working out for you? The follies of 2021 at least make writing this column easier. So, we went digging for inanity for the purpose of making gentle fun of things that broadly annoy us and, shockingly, we found things to talk about. So, here we are once again.Continue Reading 2021 Golden Turkeys
I’ve been offline for a bit. An amalgam of writer’s block caused by the enormity of the Coronavirus mess – what can be said that’s useful – and the consequence of being wildly busy as everyone across financial markets tries to pivot to the new reality. Unburdened by any knowledge of science, medicine or epidemiology, I have been marinating in the output of such intellectually distinguished journals as The Sun, The Daily Beast, The Onion, The Mirror, The New York Post and Drudge on the daily ups and downs of our plague, its cost in blood and treasure and the disruption it has caused across all aspects of our life. Consequently, I have opinions but I’ve concluded they’re pretty damn worthless. We’re in uncharted waters, akin to those bits on a medieval map where the cartographers had no clue and wrote: “Here be Dragons.”
Continue Reading Playing with Broken Toys in Coronavirus Land
You know, as an economist, I am a pretty good piano player. I struggle every morning, marinating in the news cycle, to try to understand what’s happened to the US economy and what its impact will be or might be upon the business of commercial real estate finance. We apparently are inching up on the point where the Fed may or may not do something, but as we discussed in this column a while back, the Fed’s idiosyncratic love affair with transparency is creating a cacophony of voices both in and outside of government that make even that threshold question hard to answer. It would seem we ought to pay attention, but, as the fed-heads and the commentariat continuously randomly blather and bloviate it’s just all noise, so what’s the point? I have been and remain fundamentally confused and in all the chatter I don’t see much wisdom or insight.
Continue Reading Commercial Real Estate and the Broader US Economy: What Me, Worry?