Back in 2007, former options trader and New York Times best-selling author Nassim Taleb released a book called The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. In it, Taleb addresses the indiscriminate and often destructive power of unforeseen global events: “It is easy to see that life is the cumulative effect of a handful…
In order to fully grasp the seismic shift currently underway in the international monetary system, we must first understand the sheer dominance of the U.S. dollar. We live in a dollar-centric moment. The U.S. dollar is currently the world’s prevailing reserve currency. More than half of world trade occurs in dollars, and more than 62…
Back in 1858, as a candidate for the U.S. Senate, Abraham Lincoln made a famous speech to his Republican colleagues in the Illinois Hall of Representatives. The speech, entitled “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” was considered radical at the time. It was a lecture about “putting an end to slavery agitation,” and while…
As one of the most volatile Octobers in the history of Wall Street moves into the rearview mirror, we’re left with the uneasy task of assessing the damage to our retirement holdings. Whether you’re vested in stocks, bonds, mutual funds, real estate, or even cash, you likely took some hits last month. October was an…
A bear market is generally considered to be a period in which stock prices fall by 20 percent or more and features a self-sustaining sell-off. It’s often accompanied by widespread pessimism and losses across all of the broad market indexes—like the Dow, the S&P 500, and the Nasdaq. But that’s not exactly what we’re experiencing…
When it comes to downturns in the economy, is hindsight only 20/20—or can you protect your assets by adjusting your allocations based upon the economic cycle? Wait—there’s an economic cycle? There is, indeed, and the leading authority on the patterns, fluctuations, and duration of the cycle is the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Analysts…
There was a time when Sears, Roebuck and Company was as ingrained in the American psyche as baseball, pickup trucks, and fireworks. It was where many U.S. consumers went to get a washer and dryer, a new bicycle, work jeans—or, as Billy Joel said in his 1977 song “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant,” “a couple…
Many are saying it: “The Fed will cause the next crash!” But what do they mean, and how plausible is it? The Fed is America’s central bank, and by their own definition, their role is to provide the nation with a “safer, more flexible, and more stable monetary and financial system.” Established back in 1913…
It has been 10 years since the employees of Lehman Brothers stepped out onto Sixth Avenue carrying cardboard boxes and became the enduring symbol of America’s largest bankruptcy. What followed, as they say, is history. Markets collapsed, trillions in wealth evaporated, and big, splashy investment firms fell like dominoes. A decade later, former British Prime…
“There was the greatest bubble I’ve ever seen in my life…. The entire American public eventually was caught up in a belief that housing prices could not fall dramatically.” Warren Buffett, testifying before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, 2010 Ten years ago, we were deep in the weeds of the Great Recession when American homeowners saw…
According to the Baker Library Historical Collection at Harvard Business School, the three Lehman brothers, Henry, Emanuel, and Mayer, emigrated from Germany in the 1840s and opened up a dry goods store in Montgomery, Alabama. During this time, cotton was a vital and high valuation crop and the brothers quickly began accepting raw cotton in…
Every year in July, the festival of San Fermín is held in Pamplona, Spain. San Fermin is the co-patron saint of Navarre who was martyred at the age of 31 and apparently dragged through the streets by a bull. Despite the fact that it was likely Saint Saturninus who actually met his fate in this…
