Jackson Hole is an American winter resort in the state of Wyoming. In summer, it is usually very quiet in such ski resorts, but for visitors to Yellowstone National Park, it is on the route. Moreover, the valley near Jackson Hole offers good views of the Grand Tetons. On that…

Just when the market has finally embraced the concept of a soft landing, investors are finding out that there are also drawbacks to a soft landing. Compared to the doomsday image of stagflation less than a year ago, a soft landing may revive the fairy tale of Goldilocks, but that…

Warren Buffet’s investment advice is to put 10 percent into short-term Treasuries and 90 percent into a low-cost index fund on the S&P 500 index. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll assume that that includes only U.S. stocks. The late Jack Bogle wouldn’t invest outside the U.S. either. The typical…

The importance of energy to an economy is often underestimated. According to Einstein, everything is made up of energy (E=MC2), which means that everything is there as a result of energy. Energy is often invisible. Take electricity, the heat of the sun or the movement of air, for example. Without…

The monetary surprise last week came not from the ECB or the Federal Reserve, but from the Bank of Japan. In monetary terms, the Bank of Japan has gone further than the other two central banks in recent years. Where those two banks fixed the quantity (of bonds to be…

Recessions have different causes. The more recent recessions were mainly caused by the financial system. As a result, the main fear was deflation. Such fear combined with a large amount of debt is lethal. If there is deflation, the cash flows to pay off the debts shrink and the contraction…

On June 24, suddenly a Russian invasion of Russia fared better than the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Wagner army took the military hub of Rostov-on-Don and then steamed rapidly toward Moscow. Later that day, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the owner of the Wagner group, also quickly halted the advance again to…

The U.S. jobs report was much stronger than expected with a whopping 339,000 jobs (195,000 expected and the previous two months were also revised upward by 93,000), but the unemployment rate rose from 3.4 percent to 3.7 percent (the highest level in seven months) while wage growth slowed to 4.3…

After several decades of low inflation, investors are now again facing probably a somewhat longer period of higher inflation. Inflation comes at the expense of purchasing power, and this touches on the main risk of investing, which is the permanent loss of wealth (purchasing power). One way to mitigate this…