This week’s Animal Spirits with Michael & Ben is sponsored by YCharts: Mention Animal Spirits and receive 20% off your subscription price when you initially sign up for the service. We discuss: Apple vs. Amazon in a heavyweight battle of fundamentals & market caps. Facebook employees make a lot of money. Is banning stock buybacks really going to…
Ben Carlson
Insert Your Economic Story Here
The Great Depression is endlessly fascinating to me because I can’t imagine something like that happening in modern times in the U.S. The Great Recession was the worst financial crisis we’ve seen since the 1930s but it was child’s play compared to that period. The Great Recession saw GDP decline 5.1% with the unemployment rate…
Simple vs. Complex, 2018 Edition
Jason Zweig recently chatted with the ever-candid Charlie Munger, who had this to say of value investors: The money managers among them are “like a bunch of cod fishermen after all the cod’s been overfished,” Mr. Munger tells me. “They don’t catch a lot of cod, but they keep on fishing in the same waters. That’s…
Are Super Bowl Ads Worth The Money?
The average cost of an ad for this year’s Super Bowl between the New England Patriots and LA Rams1 is estimated to be more than $5 million. That’s an enormous cost for 30 seconds of ad space. It seems insane corporations would spend this kind of money but the data suggests these commercials are worth…
Selectively Cheap
There’s an old saying that goes something like this: if you want to know someone’s priorities in life just look at their checkbook online banking statement and calendar. How people spend their time and money tells you a lot about where their priorities lie. Unfortunately, budgeting is a four-letter word for most people, so very…
Animal Spirits Episode 66: Adverse Variance
On this week’s Animal Spirits with Michael & Ben we discuss: What does all that cash moving to the sidelines tell us? How markets have changed since 1800. Valuations between U.S. and foreign stocks are wider than they’ve been in 40 years. Does the U.S. deserve a valuation premium? Why are there no star fund…
Planning For The Predictable & The Unpredictable
A reader asks: How do you plan for major expenses, and is there any rule of thumb we should use when saving for a home, and a wedding? Also is it okay to use our Roth IRA accounts to save for a home? The average wedding in the U.S. is estimated at more than $33,000 so unless…
Who Owns All the Stocks & Bonds?
Jesse Livermore once said, “Another lesson I learned early is that there is nothing new in Wall Street. There can’t be because speculation is as old as the hills. Whatever happens in the stock market today has happened before and will happen again.” In other words, humans are the one constant in the markets and…
Shifting Risks in the Bond Market
The Fed has raised interest rates nine times since December 2015. As much as some prognosticators would have you believe the Fed completely manipulates the interest rate markets, they really only have control over short-term rates. Long-term rates have a mind of their own and the bond market doesn’t always agree with the Fed on…
The Gordon Gekko of Fyre Festival
When Oliver Stone made the movie Wall Street in 1987 he was using the story to show how corrupt the banking system had become. The Gordon Gekko character, played brilliantly by Michael Douglas, was created as an over-the-top, egomaniacal, greed-filled villain to showcase what’s wrong with the financial world. Stone has since admitted in interviews…
