July 19, 2024 By Steve Blumenthal “Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives. Choice, not chance, determines your destiny.” – Dr. Aristotle  There is good news coming––really good news––though it’s hard for us to see it just yet.    It is evident that we are in a period of tremendous discord, geopolitically and domestically, with nothing more on the front page than the ugliness of our politics. As Ian Bremmer tweeted late last night, “Never in ..read more

  July 12, 2024 By Steve Blumenthal “The Chevron decision means that the American civil service and agencies will no longer have wide authority to interpret legislation. Now, they will generally require legislation to act. In practical terms, this means that there is no more latitude in engaging in administrative guidance. This means that the kind of bank bailouts and creative financing arrangements that have characterized financial crises in the past are no longer possible. All problems of that magnitude will have to be handled directly by Congress, which has never been known to be ve ..read more

  June 7, 2024 By Steve Blumenthal “One of the prime lessons learned from long-term analysis is that no asset class can stay permanently detached from fundamentals.”  – Jeremy J. Siegel, Stocks for the Long Run: The Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long-Term Investment Strategies We often hear that stocks produce the best returns over the long run. Jeremy Siegel took the data back to 1802, comparing Stocks, Bonds, Treasury Bills, and Gold relative to inflation. Stocks produced an 8.4% annualized return, and Bonds came in second, and inflation came in last. $1 dol ..read more

  June 28, 2024 By Steve Blumenthal “The AI boom is fueling an insatiable appetite for electricity, which is creating risks to the grid and the transition to cleaner energy sources.”  – Katherine Blunt and Jennifer Hiller, Wall Street Journal, “Big Tech’s Latest Obsession Is Finding Enough Energy,” March 24, 2024  Today’s post is all about AI and energy, and I’m really excited to share it with you. I’ve been doing a lot of research in both areas, and it just keeps hitting me how much each one needs the other. And it’s not just me.   While in Texas last week, I met a ..read more

  June 21, 2024 By Steve Blumenthal “All of the following factors appear to be inflationary: ongoing fiscal spending, remilitarization of the world, restructuring of global trade, capital needs of the green economy and possibly higher energy costs due to the lack of needed investment.”  – Jamie Dimon, CEO, JPMorgan Chase  One of the really good things about Dallas, Texas, is how much everyone who lives there loves living there—it’s a warm and friendly place. I was there for two days for a due diligence visit and an excellent dinner with clients and friends. With laptops and h ..read more

  June 14, 2024 By Steve Blumenthal “I’ll reiterate my belief again that after the inflation spike and inflation slow down, we are not just magically coming down to around 2% and staying there. Inflation volatility is here and will be for a while.”  – Peter Boockvar, The Boock Report There was a good deal of activity on the data front this week. The 10-year note auction was met with decent demand, while the 30-year bond auctions saw above-average demand. The yield on the 10-year Treasury is down to 4.21%—below the important threshold of 4.33%.  I had lunch with Barry Habib, D ..read more

  May 31, 2024 By Steve Blumenthal “Do I think that rates can go up a little bit? Yes I do. And if they do is the world prepared for it? Not really.” – Jamie Dimon, CEO, JPMorgan Chase A seemingly endless amount of research crosses my desk each week. Most of it is nonsense. My head clicks, “Doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter… and then something important sticks out that “matters.” Internally, we spend a lot of money on independent research. If you’ve been reading OMR long enough, you are familiar with Ned Davis Research and Zulauf Consulting—two research firms I personally favor. Yet our r ..read more

  May 24, 2024 By Steve Blumenthal “As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.” -John F. Kennedy This is a short note this week as I’m racing to get on the road to Ithica, NY. Our youngest is graduating tomorrow, and Susan, I, and our family will celebrate our son.  Grab your coffee and find your favorite chair. I post a quick update on the escalating tensions between China and Taiwan after Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te’s inauguration “independence” speech and conclude with a short story about Memor ..read more

  May 25, 2024 By Steve Blumenthal “One of the key priorities today of Chinese policymakers is to de-dollarize their trade, is to reduce their dependency on the U.S. dollar. And this is much more for geostrategic reasons than economic reasons. I think in the past 15, 20 years, you have seen the U.S. dollar weaponized time and time again to confront geopolitical rivals or problematic countries […] And the U.S. politicians have used the hammer of the U.S. dollar to beat people up, and China doesn’t want to be on the other side of that hammer.…” -Louis-Vincent Gave China and Russia signed ..read more

  May 10, 2024 By Steve Blumenthal “The horizon leans forward, offering you space to place new steps of change.” – Maya Angelou Grab your coffee and find your favorite chair. This week, I will continue sharing several high-level takeaways from the Mauldin Economics 2024 Strategic Investment Conference.   As with most things in economics, there was no collective agreement on the economy’s current or future state, but there were some interesting arguments for inflation. Louis-Vincent Gave had a particularly interesting take that I had not considered before. Sitting back, taking in t ..read more