For most people, the Nothingness of Money strikes when the finish line is a few yards away. A terminal diagnosis is delivered. An appointment is made at a hospice center. A deathbed is prepared. In this moment, a pursuit that once seemed all-consuming fades into the background. All that matters are the memories you have, the people you love, and the memories you can still make with them. The use of your finite time to squeeze out an extra dollar is laughable, as no one with a sound mind would expect that of you. And finally, in this brief section of life, something profound happens. The Nothingness of Money is truly understood.
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The life secret Jerry Seinfeld learned decades ago: “The only thing in life that’s really worth having is good skill. Pursue mastery that will fulfill your life.” This thought stemmed from an edition of Esquire magazine in the late 1980’s that was so popular it inspired books to be written about it. These are the key takeaways from that article.
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Habits determine a future more than goals. If a child comes to class every day properly prepared, asks questions or attends extra help, does their homework, and refrains from most distractions regarding discovering the opposite sex, the grades will take care of themselves.
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Lyn Alden discusses how Fed interest rate cuts may impact the economy and financial markets moving forward: The fact that the U.S. was 1) running larger fiscal deficits than its peer countries and 2) had a private sector with more locked-in fixed rates than its peer countries, made it more de-sensitized to this global cycle of rising interest rates than its peer countries. In the downcycle, we could see exactly the reverse. As multiple countries cut interest rates, the countries that have private sectors with more variable-rate debt can get a consumer and corporate stimulus more readily from those lower rates, while the U.S. economy already has most of its private debt fixed at lower rates and wouldn’t get much of a stimulus from a moderate cut in interest rates. Emerging markets could benefit the most, from the starting position of significant weakness.
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A new research paper on the history of U.S. stock returns, and what we can learn from them, has been making the rounds. This article summarizes some of the key ideas from the study.
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The combination of the Great Financial Crisis period and the Covid era created some of the most interesting economic experiments in history. They also resulted in some of the worst narratives in finance and economics. Here are three bad narratives that are dead but won’t yet be laid to rest because economic narratives are hard to bury.
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