The Martin Hutchinson Place
Interest rates turned up decisively during 2021 and inflation has receded somewhat, yet stock prices are close to their all-time highs, far above traditional valuation norms. Analysts expect this trend to continue, with Goldman Sachs this week raising its 2024 target for the Standard and Poor’s 500 index to 5,100. The problem is: continued bullishness […]
The Biden Administration’s Lina Khan, head of the Federal Trade Commission, is one of the administration’s very few bright spots, intellectually speaking. She has overthrown the existing merger jurisdiction, set up by the late great Judge Robert Bork in the 1980s, to question why the FTC should let through mergers as a matter of course. […]
It was French President Charles de Gaulle who in 1965 referred to the dollar’s position as the world’s leading international reserve currency as conferring “exorbitant privilege” on the United States. De Gaulle’s words represented his usual mixture of deep and subtle wisdom and fierce resentment of the Anglo-Saxon powers. For forty years after he spoke, […]
Much has been written about the end of the bond bull market of 1981-2021 and the return to higher interest rates in the future. In this environment, conventional long-term bonds are a poor investment – their value is eroded by inflation and their prices will fall if interest rates rise. However, there is now an […]