“If you had played it long and put $10,000 into Russia a decade ago, you’d have $1.6k worth of equities. Had you backed the Nasdaq’s key tech stocks (via the QQQ ETF) your investment would have grown to $52k, despite the sector rotation we’ve seen at the start of the year.”
From ExonentialView
Didn’t they say bitcoin is an inflation and a global risk hedge? Well, so we have high inflation, a war starting, a likely increased energy bottlenecks due to said war further negatively impacting inflation. And gold reacts pretty much how you would an inflation and risk hedge to react (by going up). Bitcoin on the other hand seems to at most move sideways.
these costs will likely add to inflation pressure for a while ... sounds like an ease up on the shipping side is still a bit out. Not sure an executivd order will help much.
Graphic from: Biden to Target Railroads, Ocean Shipping in Executive Order
Today a bunch more links, I did some catching up on some older pieces last night …
-Are Vaccinated Americans Powering the Economy? Not Yet, Data Show — it just looks like some people are more responsible and less self-centered.
-Contagious Unemployment — interesting data and analysis on speed of job market recovery.
-There are reasons to worry about US inflation — more inflation related thoughts, the title I guess says it all.
-America’s urban crime wave threatens Biden — I agree, crime should be priority for Biden. Though also interesting to read the comments, lots of idiots out there.
Reading this piece about bubbles (Talking bubbles with Jeremy Grantham)got me thinking about the effectiveness of markets. In economics there is this idea of the “market is always right” or the “invisible hand of the market”. But considering the last 30 years (and I will admit that is a rather short timeframe), one could think the market really only bounces between fantasy and the real-world. One could think that the market, driven by greed, really is only interested in a bubble like growth until reality catches up with the market, the bubble bursts, and then all of this starts again. All that said, it looks less like a smart market to me, but rather like a 2 year old who goes crazy until they are brought back to reality by their parents, and then they will start again. One driver for this erratic, greed driven behavior could be the amount of easy money that is floating around, that is driving stupid decisions (in a way the SoftBank fund investments are a good example of “too much money” chasing any type of investment, no matter how stupid).
Despite all the positive news from the stock market, general economic indicators, and also the job market, it’s important to realize the country is still down 8.2 million jobs, compared to pre Covid.
