Economics

The Veneer of Affluence

The Veneer of Affluence

The consumer credit crisis has created a lag in recession signals by temporarily inflating credit scores and spending power, masking underlying financial distress. Similar dynamics preceded the 2008 financial crisis, where easy credit defaults led to a sudden collapse of the bull market.

New Order of the Ages

New Order of the Ages

“Trees don’t grow to the sky,” they say. But there are substantial reasons to question whether the “new market” is like the old market, and redress its underlying mechanisms.

Democratization & DeFi

Democratization & DeFi

Will the underlying technologies of DeFi live up to the fervor and marketing hype, or will the technology inevitably be cast aside, a hollow shell of its ethos, living on in name only as its “brand power” is strategically co-opted by dominant interests?

The Story of Target Date Funds

The Story of Target Date Funds

The Target Date Fund, now a staple of 401(k) plans, has a surprisingly colorful origin—emerging from academic theory, shaped by pension consulting, and even brushing up against Star Wars and Kubrick. Behind its quiet ubiquity lies a story of mathematical elegance, financial innovation, and unexpected creativity.

Greater Fools

Greater Fools

The greater fool is an economic term. For the rest of us to profit, we need a greater fool — someone who will buy high and sell low.

Price Illusions

Price Illusions

While passive investing offers cost efficiency and broad exposure, its growing dominance may cause illusory distortions in prices and leave markets more vulnerable to abrupt dislocations when the tide turns.

Tactical Sector Investing

Tactical Sector Investing

A sector investing strategy is like a well-designed oil tanker navigating volatile seas. Just as an oil tanker is built with separate compartments to keep liquid cargo from shifting and destabilizing the vessel, a portfolio made up of sector ETFs can isolate risk and limit damage from downturns in any one part of the economy.

The Great Hollowing?

The Great Hollowing?

In the elegant machinery of economics, supply and demand form a perfect circle—each feeding the other in a self-sustaining loop, like the smooth symmetry of a donut. In the new world of AI, the donut isn’t just missing its center—it’s crumbling from the inside out.

Bancor

Bancor

Bancor was a supranational currency proposed in 1944 to facilitate international trade by balancing global liquidity and preventing chronic trade deficits and surpluses through an International Clearing Union.

Finfluence

Finfluence

Social media influencers have not only altered the way financial information is consumed, but the markets themselves.

The Risk-Free Risk

The Risk-Free Risk

Bond markets are the referee for economic discipline, raising an eyebrow to reckless borrowing and sternly saying, “Behave, or I’ll raise your yields.”

The Tail of AI

The Tail of AI

The broad range of technologies that we call Artificial Intelligence or AI are going to change the world, but probably not in the ways many speculate. The underlying question is not just the core technology, it’s how it can be applied to deliver practical cost-effective value without egregious energy.

Money?

Money?

Is the system of money we use today working ? Are there are better alternatives on the horizon? There’s certainly a lot of talk about cryptocurrency. Can we learn anything from the gold standard about crypto’s potential to establish a new type of currency?