March 31, 2023 By Steve Blumenthal “Quantitative easing ‘worked’ by flooding the economy with so much zero-interest base money that investors lost their minds, driving even long-term interest rates to record-low levels, and driving our most reliable stock market valuation measures [...]Read More >

  March 24, 2023 By Steve Blumenthal “Swing your swing. Not some idea of a swing. Not a swing you saw on TV. Not that swing you wish you had. No, swing your swing. Capable of greatness. Prized only by you. Perfect in its imperfection. Swing your swing. I know, I did.” - Arnold [...]Read More >

  March 17, 2023 By Steve Blumenthal “The last two years [are] one of the biggest policy mistakes in the 110-year history of the Fed, by staying so easy when everything was booming,” - Jeremy Siegel “My problem with the Fed, overall, is there’s too many academics in the mix,” said [...]Read More >

  March 10, 2023 By Steve Blumenthal “It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.” – The Gabriel García Márquez (March 6, 1927 – April 17, 2014) This morning, February payrolls came in 85,000 jobs higher [...]Read More >

  March 3, 2023 By Steve Blumenthal “If they stand behind you, defend them. If they stand next to you, respect them, If they stand against you, defeat them.” – The Wolf's Crede I attend several investment conferences every year, and the best one, hands down, is the conference [...]Read More >

  February 24, 2023 By Steve Blumenthal “We find no instance in which a central [bank]–induced disinflation occurred without a recession. [. . .] Simulations of our baseline model suggest that the Fed will need to tighten policy significantly further to achieve its inflation [...]Read More >

  February 17, 2023 By Steve Blumenthal “I don’t think what we’re going through right now is just a normal cycle fluctuation. For over forty years we were in an environment with declining interest rates, and for the last thirteen years, we had this benign, accommodative environment. [...]Read More >

  February 10, 2023 By Steve Blumenthal “The Money-Credit-Debt-Markets-Economic Cycles: In my opinion the tightening that began in March 2022 ended the last paradigm in which central banks gave away money and credit essentially for free, which was great for the borrower-debtors. We [...]Read More >

  February 3, 2023 By Steve Blumenthal “Over the past year, the S&P 500 has retreated only modestly from its January 2022 speculative peak, yet interest rates have normalized to a much greater extent. That, in my view, is probably the most dangerous aspect of the current market [...]Read More >

  January 27, 2023 By Steve Blumenthal “Earnings don't move the 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 >

  January 20, 2023 By Steve Blumenthal “Debt crises are inevitable. Throughout history, only a very few well-disciplined countries have avoided debt crises. That’s because lending is never done perfectly and is often done badly due to how the cycle affects people’s psychology to [...]Read More >

  January 13, 2023 By Steve Blumenthal “Inharrent in big crises are opportunities.” – Ian Bremmer I'm on vacation this week, skiing in Snowbird, Utah. The rain kept falling in California, and as the storms moved east, the snow kept falling in Utah. We've had over three feet of [...]Read More >

  January 6, 2023 By Steve Blumenthal “Extreme patience combined with extreme decisiveness. You may call that our investment process. Yes, it's that simple.” – Charlie Munger “Cash combined with courage in a crisis is priceless.” – Warren Buffett Last week I reviewed my investment [...]Read More >

  December 30, 2022 By Steve Blumenthal “There are only two ways to live life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” – Albert Einstein Forecasting the future. It's an annual ritual played out on Wall Street, in C-suites, and in small [...]Read More >

Trade Signals, by Steve Blumenthal December 23, 2022 S&P 500 Index --3.829 Trade Signals summarize various Equity, Fixed Income, Sentiment, Economic, and Gold market indicators. Market trends persist over time and stem from changes in risk premiums (the return investors demand to compensate [...]Read More >