Dylan Grice on good investment returns

To make good returns in the long run, you need to get to the long run as the law of the jungle dictates that survival takes priority over reproduction.

~ Dylan Grice

Dylan Grice on the end of the duration bull market

It's been a golden age for duration.  In the bond market, interest rates have gone from 20% to zero in effect over a 40 year period.  So the total return from government bonds over the last 40 years has been higher than the total return to equities in the previous 100 years on an annualized basis...  The most interesting, maybe the most practical dimension to this is that this has happened over four decades.  In other words, that's a full career in finance.  And so you have had, I think, this phenomenal tailwind and to multiple asset classes.  Obviously corporate bonds and credit markets have had a huge tailwind from the bull market in government bonds, but so have other duration assets.  So real duration assets like equities, private equity or venture equity, arguably real estate.  All of these things have had this enormous tailwind...  So this end of a duration bull market, if that bull market turned into a bear market than pretty much all conventional mainstream portfolios are going to be tossed.

~ Dylan Grice, interview, The Meb Faber Show, 7:35 mark, April 11, 2022

Barry Sternlicht on Jay Powell: "I feel like he's the captain driving the Titanic into the ocean"

We're not arguing that the Fed has to act to bring down inflation, but we need to understand where the inflation came from.  It came from all those global stimulus packages on the back of the reopening global economy.  It was to the moon and beyond.  They missed the meme stocks, they missed the casino and now that we're building momentum and people are getting employed, and wages are rising, now they want to stomp on the whole thing and end the party.  I feel like he's the captain driving the Titanic into the ocean.  Consumers in the U.S. are still spending, but it's inevitable that they can't keep this up.  So the Fed has to stop... They're going to cause unbelievable calamities if they keep up their actions, not just here, but all over the whole globe.

~ Barry Sternlicht, CNBC interview, 2:20 mark, October 4, 2022

Dan Ferris on misplaced faith in central bankers

It's not that central bankers aren't doing their job right.  It's that the job shouldn't exist and can't be done any way but wrong.

~ Dan Ferris, tweet, September 30, 2022

Alex Epstein: "by our standards, the world is extremely energy poor"

By our standards, the world is extremely poor, including energy poor, and one point I make in the book is that there are six billion people in the world who by our standards use a totally inadequate amount of energy, less electricity than one of our refrigerators uses.  We live in a world that is energy deprived, and then you learn that fossil fuels provide 80 percent of that energy and their use is still growing, particularly in the parts of the world that care most about low-cost reliable energy.  It is insane to talk about phasing them out rapidly.  The other side has an enormous burden of proof when claiming that we should be phasing out fossil fuels when the value they provide is so needed and they’re clearly uniquely good at providing it.

~ Alex Epstein, "Debunking Fossil Fuel Hysteria: An Interview with Alex Epstein," The Austrian, September-October 2022

Wendy McElroy on the Enclosure Acts, exploitation and the Industrial Revolution

It would be deceptively simplistic to blame the Enclosure Acts alone for the impoverishment usually ascribed to the Industrial Revolution.  Many factors were in play.  For example, the majority of people in pre-Industrial England dwelt in the countryside, where they often supplemented their income through cottage industries, especially the weaving of wool.  This income evaporated with the advent of cheap cotton and industrialized methods of weaving it.  Many influences contributed to the desperation of an unemployed army of workers. 

What enclosure does illustrate without question, however, is that the abuses ascribed to the Industrial Revolution are far from straightforward.  Blaming industrialization for workers’ misery is not merely simplistic, it is also often incorrect.  Whether or not some exploitation would have existed within free-market industrialization, the abuses of the Industrial Revolution were standardized, institutionalized, and carried to excess by government and the use of the political means.

~ Wendy McElroy, "The Enclosure Acts and the Industrial Revolution," Future of Freedom Foundation, March 8, 2012

Kevin Duffy on investing in energy stocks

You have to be willing to be politically incorrect.  It takes a certain amount of courage to do that, and most people aren’t wired that way.  The green energy lobby has basically been trying to put fossil fuels out of business, but that’s the type of industry that interests me.  Oil and gas companies provide a vital commodity in which supply is severely constrained by ideology and politics.  Reality is starting to sink in that we can’t just cancel fossil fuels and that this was always a delusion.  So even though many commodity prices will go down, energy prices should be a lot stickier.

~ Kevin Duffy, "We're Dealing With a Very Different Animal," The Market, July 18, 2022