I’m not one to typically advocate following the herd but in the case of the coronavirus, I am having a hard time seeing an end game that doesn’t have herd immunity as the ultimate goal. And this could take a long time and lead to a lengthier economic contraction (to put it mildly) and even more massive federal intervention through government spending and Federal Reserve support of financial markets.
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Last week was a crazy week preparing for rent collections this week as well as going through in great detail the safety precautions we are taking to do our best to keep our employees and residents safe. That is why this blog is shorter than normal.
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Gary Carmell Posted in Economy, Interest Rates, Investing, News, People, Stock Market 1 Comment ↓ 
The title of this blog is from the Talking Heads song Life During Wartime. Maybe I should have called it Life During Quarantine instead but we are definitely on a wartime footing. If you don’t think so then maybe these charts might help convince you as financial markets are the most real-time indicator of investor sentiment and discounting the future to ascertain how investors react to key events.
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With over $6 trillion in global stock market losses in one week, it’s clear that investors have woken up to the real risk that the coronavirus is not contained, somewhat akin to the subprime crisis that Ben Bernanke famously said was and led to massive financial losses around the world.
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Gary Carmell Posted in Economy, Housing, Stock Market, Trends, Uncategorized, Wealth No Comments ↓ 
I’m admittedly obsessed by pandemics. I’ve been listening to the course on the Black Death via the Great Courses, I was in China at the tail end of SARS in 2003 and was intensely focused on what life was like during that time there, and of course,
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2020 has started off with some geopolitical fireworks that have carried over to financial markets as the headline below attests.
This is another good example of why having a hedge with U.S. Treasuries (and maybe a little gold as well) can be helpful to provide a counterweight to risk assets that inevitably take a mild beating,
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I make a concerted effort to avoid each day rolling into another without any distinction. I never want to look back on my life and have nothing stand out. I think this is one of the reasons I blog each week. It helps me reflect on my life and gives me the opportunity to bring forth those experiences,
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Scott Adams is someone I follow and I appreciate his insights about persuasion and human nature. He often says that everyone is living their own movie. They write the scripts and they have cast them with characters they have developed with personalities they have created for them.
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Gary Carmell Posted in Economy, Investing, News, Stock History, Stock Market, Trends No Comments ↓ 
It’s been a brutal couple of weeks for Treasuries as the following headline from Bloomberg attests to on September 13th.
10-year yields bottomed on a closing basis on September 3rd at 1.47% and have shot back up to 1.90% as of September 13th.
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There has been some criticism of Fed chairman Powell as he has gone from saying this in early October 2018:
To telegraphing this on July 10th:
Those who are upset by his dovish turn are irked because they feel like he is kowtowing to the market and Trump who is forcing his hand despite record high stock market averages,
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