May 21, 2021 By Steve Blumenthal “So my issue here is, in the future, as we go forward, if we look at Federal spending as a % of GDP, the CBO is saying if the 10-year Treasury goes to 4.9%, which is their normalized projection, the interest expense alone will be close to 30% of GDP every year, [...]Read More >

May 14, 2021 By Steve Blumenthal “You have to go back 40 years – to Q3 1981 – to find a higher quarterly year-over-year wage growth number (+8.5%). This is not an anomaly. This is not a single quarter aberration. This is not transitory. This is four straight quarters of the highest wage growth [...]Read More >

May 7, 2021 By Steve Blumenthal “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future!” - Niels Bohr, Nobel Laureate, Physics “Making predictions is tough, especially if it's about the future!” - Yogi Berra, Late Yankees Baseball Player, Manager and Coach Both quotes serve as [...]Read More >

April 30, 2021 By Steve Blumenthal “The question is, ‘Why do policies that have been shown to work so badly still get used so regularly?’ I have long maintained that Keynesianism is to Marxism and Socialism what diet cola is to the real sugary beverage. Hence, it falls neatly into the popular, [...]Read More >

April 23, 2021 By Steve Blumenthal "Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise." – Thomas Gray British Poet, “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College” I’m fortunate to be on the receiving end of a great deal of research. Some I pay for; some is available to all of us. I’m particularly [...]Read More >

April 16, 2021 By Steve Blumenthal “Earnings don’t move the overall market; it’s the Federal Reserve Board.... Focus on the central banks and focus on the movement of liquidity.... Most people in the market are looking for earnings and conventional measures. It’s liquidity that moves [...]Read More >

April 9, 2021 By Steve Blumenthal “Irrational exuberance is the psychological basis of a speculative bubble. I define a speculative bubble as a situation in which news of price increases spurs investor enthusiasm, which spreads by psychological contagion from person to person, in the process [...]Read More >

March 26, 2021 By Steve Blumenthal Once a quarter or so, I write about debt. We sit at the end of a long-term debt supercycle. Few of us have seen one before, though they have happened many times throughout history. The last was in the mid-1930s. Last week, my partner John Mauldin hit it out [...]Read More >

March 19, 2021 By Steve Blumenthal "This is not the end, this is not even the beginning of the end, this is just perhaps the end of the beginning." – Sir Winston Churchill On a warm summer's evening On a train bound for nowhere I met up with the gambler We were both too tired to sleep So [...]Read More >

March 12, 2021 By Steve Blumenthal “Cycles are inevitable. Every once in a while, an up- or down-let goes on for a long time and/or to a great extreme, and people start to say ‘this time it’s different.’” – Howard Marks, Co-Founder and Co-Chairman, Oaktree Capital Management Less spending, [...]Read More >

March 5, 2021 By Steve Blumenthal “No generation has a right to contract debts greater than can be paid off during the course of its own existence.” – George Washington to James Madison (1789) New week, same poker game. Powell studied the table and played his hand. I hold, he said. No change in [...]Read More >

February 26, 2021 By Steve Blumenthal "The ratio of the price of copper to the price of gold is a great inflation indicator. Copper has rallied a great deal while gold is slightly down. This tells us the U.S. 10-Year Treasury should be at 2.25% right now." – Jeffrey Gundlach, Founder, [...]Read More >

February 19, 2021 By Steve Blumenthal "Infrastructure spending is the one major area of agreement, and with Modern Monetary Theory, soaring federal deficits and debt are no obstacles. More federal stimulus is likely but worried consumers will probably use most of it to rebuild assets and reduce [...]Read More >

February 12, 2021 By Steve Blumenthal "Trying to figure out if the economy is in recession is like trying to assess if you had a fever after you just took a large dose of aspirin… But as with frogs in water that is slowly being heated to a boil, investors are being conditioned not to recognize [...]Read More >

February 5, 2021 By Steve Blumenthal “Stay away from high quality fixed income securities. It's a bubble. People are very bullish on equities because of where interest rates are. If they go even lower, you ought not to be that bullish.” - Leon Cooperman, Chairman & CEO, Omega Advisors No, [...]Read More >