Full disclosure – Jigar Shah and I are old friends and colleagues and I’ve had the privilege of working as a consultant for nearly a decade at Generate Capital, a brilliant creation of Jigar, Matan Friedman and Scott Jacobs. On my evening walk I listened to https://open.spotify.com/episode/3s0MatwSPXnYNxrAhdP58K?si=S2IpQPSIRF2eLV3xRWJpCw – a very good podcast from Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson with […]
Category: US Economy
If The Stork Brings Babies…What Does The Economy Bring?
The stork isn’t carrying the full bag of money any more…any more than the banks are. Private Credit is growing and growing at a pace that both causes concern as we watch these largely unregulated behemoths move through the economy and excites us as they transact with higher risk tolerance and generally more creativity than traditional […]
Ya Gotta Play the Cards You’re Dealt!
While that maxim has been used hundreds of times, in 1868 the first print version said: “As in a game of cards, so in the game of life, we must play what is dealt to us, and the glory consists, not so much in winning, as in playing a poor hand well.” It’s a motto I […]
Trading Uncertainty for Reality
What is 1,116 pages long and will impact our lives for a very long time? One Big Beautiful Bill Act (H.R. 1 in the 119th Congress is that long – that’s 1,023 feet. Taller than the Eifel Tower at 984 feet, just a bit shorter than the USS Enterprise at 1,092 feet and even longer than the Titanic […]
America’s FICO Score…
…just went down – again. Yup, it’s unanimous that S&P, Fitch and now Moody’s have downgraded US debt. The effect is no different than your FICO score – your cost of borrowing goes up and you have fewer lenders willing to finance your house or car and give you a credit card and the same will happen […]
As full of spirit as the month of May
Yup, May is definitely shaping up to be full of spirit – whether it’s spirit as in a spirited set of circumstances for us all to do business or spirits as in the ghosts of economies past that may come to haunt us. Heck, maybe it’s the spirits we might need to quaff to get […]
April Showers Bring…
…something new every day. Golly, it’s only mid-month with the 10 Year T moving from 4.01% to a 4.48% in two weeks – yup, a movement of nearly 12%. Then $3,263 for an ounce of gold that cost $43.05 in 1971 when President Nixon uncoupled from the gold standard…and if you invested $10,000 in gold in 1971 […]
How About Some Reading… A Roadmap for the Future
I am an economist by education and that means I can point lots of directions simultaneously. Candidly, they call it “the dismal science” for a simple reason: The term “the dismal science” is based on the pessimistic predictions of Thomas Malthus, (granted 1834 is a long time ago), who believed that population growth would always outpace food […]
There’s a New Sheriff in Town
Welcome to 2025 and we hope you and your community are off to a great start. Change is good – it keeps us sharp and on our toes and new ideas can often lead to new successes at home and the office and we hope that’s true for you! My regular readers, for whom I am […]
It’s always interest rates…the cost of money!
The cost of money drives everything. It ultimately determines the price of your home mortgage and that complex inverted lease funding your next solar project. It can accelerate growth and employment on to the Rocketship Inflation or crush them into dust. These are unassailable facts. What is not so clear is where those rates are going under President Trump’s […]