Thoughts from the Divide

We have seen busier news weeks, but we’re not sure when we last saw a more interesting news week. Let’s start at the intersection of AI and credit, an area that has been a particular focus for us of late. Regular readers will not have been surprised that TFTD was interested in the recent fuss […]

Since William’s speech on the 21st November, the market had come to understand December was a done deal. It wasn’t just Williams’ reincarnating into a dove. We also had some weaker labor market data, in the form of ADP, Intuit, and JOLTs. It wasn’t difficult to discern weakness in any of those series, so it […]

“Canary in a coal mine” is a very popular metaphor. It’s popular for a reason: who doesn’t need early warning of an impending disaster? Of course, everyone knows where the metaphor comes from. John Scott Haldane was a Scottish physiologist, physician and academic who made an astonishing contribution in several fields, and it was his […]

Readers of this Substack may have noticed a recent focus on two superficially unrelated subjects: Who will succeed Jerome Powell as the next Fed Chair, and the recent apparent marginal deterioration in credit markets, particularly the private credit markets. Of course, the subjects are only superficially unrelated. It’s not entirely coincidental that problems in the […]

It’s been an incredibly interesting news week for those of us who focus on the nexus of markets and politics. This publication is often a little self-indulgent because it aims to read (and sometimes write) between the lines on recent financial/economic/political events. That’s precisely why we enjoy writing it! But first off, a little comedy. […]

Back in October, the Nobel Prize for economics was shared between three economists for their work on explaining innovation-driven growth. Technically, there isn’t a Nobel Prize in economics. It’s the Sveriges Riksbank prize, and critics like Peter Nobel (a great-grandnephew of Alfred Nobel) have argued that Alfred Nobel would have hated the idea of a […]

Doctors, economists and politicians occasionally suggest that we should “Treat the disease, not the symptoms”. Apparently, the phrase originated with Andrew Taylor Still, the founder of osteopathic medicine, who emphasized treating the underlying causes of illness, rather than just alleviating symptoms. Still expressed this with the rather wonderful, “To find health should be the object […]

“So, the stock market, it would affect spending if the stock market went down, but it wouldn’t drop — it wouldn’t drop sharply unless there were quite a sharp drop in the stock market” I don’t know if you watched J Powell’s Q&A following the Fed’s decision to cut rates 25bps. It was another “hawkish […]

Regular readers will be familiar with our fondness for meta questions. For those unfamiliar with the term, meta questions are questions about questions. Whitney Houston must have had a similar fondness for epistemology, because she posed a meta question that we often find ourselves asking: how will I know? But it’s not the only meta […]