June 5, 2020 By Steve Blumenthal “You will get business failures on a grand scale.” - James Bullard, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (May 12, 2020) Let’s talk about valuations. Forward price-to-earnings (P/E) sits at 22.4. Median P/E (my favorite indicator, which looks at [...]Read More >

May 29, 2020 By Steve Blumenthal Wisdom (noun): The quality or state of being wise; knowledge of what is true or right coupled with just judgment as to action; sagacity, discernment, or insight. This week you’ll find my summary notes and thoughts from Dr. Lacy Hunt’s SIC 2020 presentation. He [...]Read More >

May 22, 2020 By Steve Blumenthal “The problem I have is that it’s pure fantasy to think that normalized earnings are not going to be seriously dented by the likely permanent loss of some 10 million workers in the future from what the baseline was prior to the crisis, which means lost labor [...]Read More >

May 15, 2020 By Steve Blumenthal “There is no atheist in a foxhole; there is no capitalist in a crisis.” - Jim Bianco, President and Macro Strategist, Bianco Research (Mauldin Economics Virtual Strategic Investment Conference, 2020) Rosenberg stepped to the plate. As leadoff hitter for more [...]Read More >

May 8, 2020 By Steve Blumenthal “We’re only down 15% from the all-time high of February 19, and it seems to me that the world is more than 15% screwed up.” - Howard Marks, Co-Founder and Co-Chairman, Oaktree Capital (April 20, 2020) When asked for his thoughts on the market, my friend and [...]Read More >

May 1, 2020 By Steve Blumenthal “The net effect will further worsen the debt overhang. We know from similar efforts here, in Japan, Europe, and China this provides no more than a fleeting boost to economic activity at the expense of additional weakness in future economic activity. This shift [...]Read More >

April 24, 2020 By Steve Blumenthal “In order to understand why empires and their economies rise and fall and what is happening to the world order right now, you need to understand how money, credit, and debt work. Understanding how they work is critically important because that which has [...]Read More >

April 17, 2020 By Steve Blumenthal “For the time before this current crisis, I give practically all central banks a miserable grade. But in the crisis they do the right thing. Well, the Fed's rate cuts would not have been necessary, they are of no use in the current situation. But it is [...]Read More >

April 10, 2020 By Steve Blumenthal “So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear that there is no alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system.” - [...]Read More >

April 3, 2020 By Steve Blumenthal “There are no new eras—excesses are never permanent.” – Bob Farrell Bob Farrell’s 10 Rules for Investing I went to sleep last night with more hope in my heart then I’ve felt over the last several weeks. These days, I’ve been feeling more like Eeyore than [...]Read More >

March 27, 2020 By Steve Blumenthal "We entered into the current crisis with a whole financial system that had been incentivized by policymakers to take on excessive levels of debt and leverage. The turmoil we are seeing right now is the result of the unwinding of this leverage. The primary [...]Read More >

March 20, 2020 By Steve Blumenthal “I am proposing that we do not think outside of the box. We must get rid of the box.” – John Mauldin This week’s piece was hard for me to write. How does an optimist keep their spirits up? I’m OD’ing on the news and with coffee in hand early this morning, I [...]Read More >

March 13, 2020 By Steve Blumenthal “We didn’t know then, just like we don’t know now, how long or how sharp or shallow of a downturn we will face.” - Alfred Lin, Partner, Sequoia Capital Sequoia Capital is a venture capital firm that invests in early stage businesses, providing seed or series [...]Read More >

March 6, 2020 By Steve Blumenthal “It will take considerable time — perhaps several quarters — before we can be confident that the virus has been contained. It will take even longer for the global economy to recover its footing.” - Letter from Sequoia Capital to Founders and CEOs of its [...]Read More >

February 28, 2020 By Steve Blumenthal “I hope nobody took President Trump’s “buy the dip” investment advice… The disruption to economic activity due to the coronavirus will be ongoing.” - David Rosenberg, Founder, Chief Economist, and Strategist, Rosenberg Research and Associates This morning, [...]Read More >