Chinese Lending Practices
I am reading with some fascination the incredible excesses that have been taking place in China with regard to terrible lending practices and widespread fraud. The unregulated banking system is clearly running amuck in China. Here is a very interesting link from Mish’s Global Economic Trends highlighting the massive problems unfolding with regard to loan guarantees not to being honored.
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When one thinks of disruptors it’s not surprising to think of modern tech titans like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Reed Hastings, Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, Marc Benioff, Steve Jobs, Larry Page, etc. I was reading an interview with the great American writer Philip Roth in the New York Times and he referenced books that he has recently read and what triggered his interest in them.
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Trite generalizations have been able to have longevity because there is enough truth in them to have proven wise and insightful. One of them is that markets go up like an escalator and drop like an elevator. Last week was a perfect example of this.
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Gary Carmell
Posted in Apartments, Economy, Housing, Investing, Manufacturing, News
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[2018 UPDATE ] The Dallas Fed released its Texas Manufacturing Outlook Survey, January 29, 2018. The data was collected Jan. 16–24, and 97 Texas manufacturers responded to the survey. As you can see the business indicators in Texas remain strong as following chart shows:
Note the highlighted section showing that every indicator is “increasing”.
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Gary Carmell
Posted in Economy, Interest Rates, Investing, Manufacturing, Market Bubbles, Uncategorized, Wealth
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Maybe I’m writing about the dollar because I’m traveling abroad soon so it affects my pocketbook. It could also be due to the rather shockingly overt talking down of the dollar by Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin in Davos.
“Obviously a weaker dollar is good for us as it relates to trade and opportunities,”
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Like many other investors I am a big fan of Seeking Alpha as it is a terrific resource to research companies, markets, and to get a wide variety views regarding important economic, societal, and business trends. One of the most prolific writers there who I follow is Jeffrey Snider.
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What a difference a week makes. Last week I wrote about how the Fed starting to unwind its balance sheet shouldn’t cause us much worry in terms of triggering a meaningful increase in interest rates. Of course, yields spiked higher over a few days to seemingly contradict my sanguine outlook.
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The Fed’s balance sheet is comprised of approximately $2.5 trillion in Treasury securities and $1.8 trillion in mortgage backed securities. The following graph shows how its balance sheet has grown since 2009 through 2014 when it stopped its bond-buying program.
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It is notoriously difficult to separate the signal from the noise when it comes to investing. What information is truly meaningful enough to take action that can lead to making money or avoiding loss versus useless information that leads to decisions which bluff us in or out and lead to lost opportunity or losing money?
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“Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are pliable.”
~ Mark Twain
Balanced Investing – Home Ownership and My Fascination with Logarithms
It was a pretty busy week so this one will be rather quick. For some reason, I was intrigued by logarithms growing up.
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