Up, Up and Away? It’s been two weeks since we wrote on the Bitcoin bubble and whether investors should consider jumping on the train to never-never land. Our case against such action was that Bitcoin is volatile, doesn’t behave like a currency, isn’t backed, is extremely expensive, and could become banned.
As I’ve expressed in previous EVAs, Anatole Kaletsky is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. While he’s not well known in the US, his star shines brightly in Europe where government and financial leaders seek out his guidance. He’s also the “kal” in our partner firm, Gavekal, which was recently the subject of a glowing article in Barron’s, interviewing one of my closest friends, Louis Gave.
Ben Bernanke popularized the term “global saving glut” in March 2005 when speaking to the Virginia Association of Economists in Richmond, Va. In his statement, he argued that several forces had created a high volume of global savings and that this “saving glut” helped explain the many years of historically low yields. And that was long before the Fed and its fellow central banks, through their coordinated actions, engineered the virtual extinction of interest rates!
In early April, one of the “wise guy girl” talking heads released a video on the rise of robots where she claims that within a decade, we could be looking at dramatically different non-farm payroll data. In fact, she even quotes a Forrester study that suggests net-net, for every one job created, fifteen jobs will be lost.
Zero interest rates have made a great many people a great deal richer. But paradoxically they have strangled wealth creation. The reason for this is that enterprise is overwhelmingly a phenomenon found among smaller companies. Among big companies it is a rare quality.
