The Fed is willing to sacrifice the job market for lower inflation — Today’s episode of the The World In 2s is about wage growth or the lack thereof in inflation adjusted terms. Pic 1: Where’s the real wage growth?

M&A is pretty slow so far this year — Markets are hard to figure out these days. Certain areas (e.g. AI) definitely seem frothy. Yet amidst a surprisingly robust economy, there’s also anecdotal evidence that we’re not in a bubble just yet. The one I would point to today is the fact that M&A (mergers and acquisitions) volume thus…

2 visuals to help you understand what’s going on in the economy — Welcome to a new series where we use a few visuals (usually two) to better understand interesting things (primarily economic) that are going on in the world. Today’s topic is home prices and interest rates. Pic 1: Rates are rising along with home prices

The private sector is protected at all costs — Ray Dalio made an interesting point on one of his recent blog posts. He said that due to the huge wealth transfer from bond holders and the public sector to the private sector (corporations and households), it’s made the private sector, and therefore the U.S. economy, much less sensitive to…

Deflation, a real estate crash, and unhappy consumers threaten to indefinitely derail China’s economy — Lately the financial news cycle has been filled with articles pondering whether China has finally reached its Lehman moment. For those that are too young to remember, Lehman was the big investment bank that went down in 2008 and shocked the world into financial crisis and recession. I want to…

The argument for yes — I’ve been thinking about this for a while — is AI a truly disruptive technology? I’m still not convinced that it is. But to play devil’s advocate to myself let me spend today’s post arguing that it is. The traditional way that the world’s leading knowledge companies like Google, Microsoft…

How worried should we be about sky high federal debt? — A reader (Jacques Plante) linked me to his post on U.S. debt here. It’s on the sorry state of the U.S. debt and fiscal situation. Our current level of debt is $32 trillion or around 120% of GDP. It’s close to its all-time-high, which was reached during the pandemic. …

The cases against the Chinese yuan and Bitcoin — The U.S.’ dollars (USD) reserve currency status seems as safe today as it’s ever been over the past decade or so — inflation is down, the U.S. economy is strong, and the most important reason: competitor currencies look less attractive by the day. It’s great being the country that issues…

As the bubble pops, a fraudulent dealer is caught with his pants down — With every bubble pop, a new wave of scammers get caught with their pants down. It happened with tech stocks, mortgages, crypto, NFTs, etc. And now we’re seeing it in luxury watches. I started following this space a few years back out of personal interest (who doesn’t like a nice…