Peter Atwater on how those at the top have leveraged asset inflation

The other place where I think there's been insufficient attention paid is to the excesses of those at the very top.  If you look at the extension of credit, for example, in the private banking space since the financial crisis, it's extraordinary.  A bank like JPMorgan has more private banking loans outstanding today than it has credit card loans.  So you have a massive amount of credit that has been extended, you have an oversupply of elite product providers, service providers, whether it's luxury goods, hotels.  The sense that the elite are different and will never succumb to any kind of a cycle is just mindboggling to me.  And so nobody has contemplated the biggest potential losses could be among the customers that have heretofore been the safest.

[...]

The whole mindset of the financial elite was "Don't sell it, borrow against it.  Because if I have to sell it, I incur an enormous tax event."  And so what they've all done is to keep borrowing against it in the belief that the valuations of whatever it was were permanent.  The art collection...  It's masterful tax strategy, but it is completely devoid of a connection to reality.

~ Peter Atwater, June 2, 2022

Christine Lagarde: eurozone can avoid recession (2022)

We are not in a panic mode. 

~ ECB President Christine Lagarde, interview from Davos, May 24, 2022

Tacitus on laws and corruption

The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. 

~ Tacitus, historian

Bruce Kasman: "We don't see a near-term recession" (2022)

We don't see a near-term recession.  We see a global economy which actually does okay in the second half of the year with the U.S. slowing and the rest of the world dong somewhat better.

~ Bruce Kasman, JPMorgan's chief economist and head of global economic research, Bloomberg TV, June 6, 2022

Tren Griffin on Charlie Munger's multi-model approach

In Munger's view, it is better to be worldly wise than to spend time working with a single model that is precisely wrong.   A multiple-model approach that is only approximately right will produce a far better outcome in anything that involves people or a social system.

~ Tren Griffin, senior director of strategy at Microsoft

Peter Atwater on the parallel peak in stock and bond prices

What I think is underway, though, is a real reversal in sentiment that didn't begin this year, but began almost 18 months ago when you saw Gamestop and SPAC mania accompanied by record volumes of negative yielding interest rate bonds.  So you had this parallel peak in stock prices and in bond prices.  And that is an unprecedented moment in the markets.  We 've never seen this kind of coincidence before.  And so what I don't think investors quite appreciate is we're having an unwinding in both fixed income and equities simultaneous here and there's not going to be any place to hide in that.

~ Peter Atwater, interview with Stephanie Pomboy, Wealthion, 10:50 mark

Nicolas Carr on information overload

We're surrounded by so much information that is of immediate interest to us that we feel overwhelmed by the never-ending pressure of trying to keep up with it all.

~ Nicolas G. Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains