When Rigged Markets Become Unrigged “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” –Abraham Maslow “When asset bubbles predominate, everything looks like a pin.” –Corollary; Ross Kaplan In over 40 years(!) watching the stock market, I’ve conservatively witnessed at least 100 dips of 5% or more (20% corrections are rarer, and...Read More
“If you’re going to take a bath . . . fill the tub.” –old business(?) advice Under previous Federal Reserve chairmen Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, the Fed quite clearly conducted monetary policy so as to support the stock market (many commentators — myself included — think they overdid it; see, “2013 Person of the...Read More
How do you know someone’s a REALLY big cheese today? They have a rule named after them. First, there was The Volcker Rule (named for one of my personal heroes). Now, there is The Buffett Rule. Is it too much to aspire to having a Kaplan Rule? Now, I just have to decide what it...Read More
“Post-Bubble Price Behavior” If you don’t track financial blogs, the Op-Ed pages of The Wall Street Journal, etc. on the state of the housing market, allow me to summarize what the bears are currently saying (my paraphrase): “Yes, after a 35% price drop nationally, the air has been let out of the housing bubble. And...Read More
Testing “the Bernanke Put”So, the Federal Reserve’s $1.25 trillion program to buy mortgage-backed securities officially ended yesterday. Next up: home buyer tax credits, scheduled to expire at the end of the month. But are the Fed — and U.S. Treasury — really done? In an era of too-big-too-fail, “the Bernanke put” (preceded by “the Greenspan...Read More
