Back on October 9, we asked whether the TED spread is the new VIX: At this moment, the TED spread is the most important indicator to watch, because until the banks can honestly claim some hope of solvency and are able and willing to resume something approximating normal functioning, any other market activity is epiphenomenal at best. While the VIX deserves its popular title as the “fear index,” in this climate even it may be too broad a tool. The perception…
Saturday, October 18, 2008
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The small truck, that is. The one your five year old plays with. It still makes sense to be trading in very small sizes and keeping plenty of cash on hand, but every tea leaf we can read points bullish. Honestly, we looked extra hard for some doom and gloom to balance out the bullishness of these links, but even the perma-bears are buying down here. Warren Buffett, “Buy American. I am.” – his maxim about being fearful when others are greedy and…
Thursday, October 9, 2008
People have ideological reasons for opposing the nationalization of U.S. banks, in whole or in part, and that’s understandable. But at this moment, the only viable ideological positions seem to be Keynesian or anarchist. Paul Kedrosky summarizes the situation well: People keep talking about the perils of nationalizing the banking system. Newsflash: There currently is no banking system, if by that you mean a network of organizations lending to one another and to quality companies in a predictable way. (Look at…
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
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While we’ve been communicating more actively than usual with subscribers, things have been somewhat quieter here on the free part of the site. The reason? We don’t expect historical and statistical studies to be nearly as helpful in a market environment like this one. And since we don’t have any unique insight into the likelihood of various political and economic events coming to pass, we figure your RSS reader or pony express boy or whatever is already loaded with enough…
Friday, October 24, 2008
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