Risk-free These are nervous times for investors looking for shelter. Taking up the challenge is BlackRock, who when they aren’t buying all the family homes in America, also operate the iShares Treasury ETF. Their website provides helpful resources showing exactly what historic returns would be for plucky bond investors. In circumstances like these, capital preservation

Burst “Bitcoin, briefly the world’s favourite cryptocurrency, is in trouble. It plummeted from a peak of around $33 per unit in June to just $2.51.” Quite the fall it was too, 95% in four months. Still, it didn’t die, blocks kept coming, the monetary policy stayed exactly the same as it always was and always

The pivot that isn’t coming  While we wait for the Federal Reserve to pivot to money printing, I might put forth the suggestion that it simply isn’t going to happen. There are signs that the objective of the Fed is far bigger than simply killing off inflation. The Federal Reserve is jointly owned by the

4% Increasingly, 4% seems to be the magic number. When US 10 year yields hit that level, the system wobbles. Various collapses attest to that, first in Sri Lanka and most recently in the UK. US debt now sits at $31 trillion. At 4% interest their annual repayments would be $1.2 trillion, 50% more than

Australia It’s no surprise to see Switzerland and the USA at the top of the list for average wealth. However, if we look at median wealth the story is rather different. This measure controls for super-rich Americans who dominate the rich list. The United States does not appear at all in the top 10 for

UK goes all in The UK bond market fell off a cliff with 5 year yields shooting straight past 4%. Sterling fell to 40 year lows too, just to make sure foreign investors took a proper pummelling. The Chancellor then jumped on the Sunday morning TV shows promising more of the same, prompting further collapses

Art Scott is the CEO of Masterworks, a business that allows people to buy fractional stakes in artwork. His claim, which is nominally true, is that art has historically “returned” 23.2% annually. It’s an interesting business, but more interesting because art actually returns nothing at all. There is almost no better example of an asset

Merge complete Ethereum’s Merge completed last night around 4.30pm Australian time. Bizarrely, it was marked by the appearance of Pandas for those running Ethereum nodes. Perhaps a more robust species could have been chosen? It was a complete non-event which is exactly what was hoped for. Blocks continued being produced and some 18 hours on,

Gas again The latest EU plan to address the gas crisis is barrelling into view. After the single largest one day fall in gas prices ever last week, Russia responded by turning gas off completely. The response was predictably perverse from Ursula von der Leyen, a person not fit to care for goldfish, less still

The magic of forecasting That cartoon is from the early 1980s; not much changes. On that theme, the whole market took a dive last week as Jerome Powell reaffirmed his commitment to higher interest rates and fighting inflation. He couldn’t really say anything else though, could he? The strange thing is the Federal Reserve now