The Flying Frisby - money, markets and more

We’ve seen incredible rallies across the board this week. After a worrying sell-off late in the day and into the close on Friday, the Dow and S&P500 all both took off on Monday, rallying by over 3%. They then followed through with gains of another 3% on Tuesday. The Nasdaq was up by even more. Given that tech was so totally beaten up, I guess the bigger rally is no surprise.  You could apply the s...

Back in 2007 comedian Susan Murray phoned me up with a question. She was just arranging a new mortgage and she wanted to know where I thought interest rates were going. Should she get a fixed or a variable rate mortgage? I couldn’t make that decision for her, of course. But I could see there were underlying problems with the economy – quite serious ones – so the safest option, if there was afforda...

Bitcoin was built in reaction to all the money printing that went on in the wake of the financial crisis.  The Times’ headline “Chancellor on Brink of Second Bailout for Banks” was even embedded into the very first block in the blockchain – the genesis block.  Here was a money system that nobody, whether government or hacker, could print or debase. The rules were set in code. The inflation rate wa...

About 25 years ago, I was giving a speech at my father’s 65th birthday party. There were seventy or eighty people at the dinner and, as Dad was a playwright, most of them were theatricals. I’m a comedian, it was a fun occasion, so I wanted the speech to be funny. There were a few entertainment VIPs in the room, so there were professional as well as personal reasons to make sure my speech was as go...

US inflation numbers came in on Tuesday at 8.3%.  The markets were expecting something lower – after all, the oil price had fallen back, not to mention most commodities. 8.3% was above expectations and the markets did not like it one bit. Down they went like liquid through an open sluice. Hopes and dreams of a sustained recovery since the June carnage went with them. Actually, not totally. While t...

I’m as guilty of this as anyone, but many of us make life more difficult than it needs to be. Achieving basic happiness, or at least avoiding what depresses us, might actually be quite simple. Is happiness, simply, when reality exceeds expectation? When I was a young man I was chronically ambitious. I would lie in bed as a student, dreaming about my future, making Faustian pacts, yet nothing would...

“Pound crashes to weakest level since 1985 in blow to Truss” ran the headline on the Telegraph website yesterday. “The Bank of England had one job today”, as economist Shaun Richards put it, “which was to talk up the pound and instead their waffling sees it at US $1.14.” Theresa May Flash Crash aside, that’s a 37-year low. And that’s measuring it against the dollar. If you measure the pound’s purc...

Morning All, A slightly admin-y email today. First up: How Heavy? - the surprisingly popular "lecture with funny bits" I did at the Edinburgh Fringe this year- is coming to London’s West End for a short run later this month at  the Museum of Comedy on September 28th and 29th. It's a show about the history of weights and measures, and is, I promise you, a VERY interesting subject. Weights and measu...

My apologies if you have received this twice. Cock up at HQ. Over a Zoom call earlier in the week,  I heard some people discussing the “Russian Davos” which they had attended back in June.  I didn't even know such a thing existed, such is my Western, Ptolemaic view of the world. (Ptolemaic, by the way, to save you having to look it up, means you think you are at the centre of the universe, and eve...

While on holiday in Sark this week, I stumbled across a book in the local post office: “Silver Mining On Sark” by David Synnott, which describes an ill-fated mining operation on the island between 1836 and 1847.  Books are distilled knowledge, and I love the stuff you can find in them. Often stuff you don’t find online. “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”, runs the old French saying. It app...

A interview in today’s programme with a highly eloquent young man, Peter Young, of the Free Cities Foundation . Peter discusses China (he lived there for ten years), the Free Speech Foundation and, finally, whether today’s young will end up poorer than their parents. For details on Peter’s October conference in Prague, visit Life Time Liberty . The Flying Frisby is a reader-supported publication....

There have been some developments behind the scenes at The Flying Frisby, which are going to add considerable value. In addition to my own contributions, starting this week, once per month for paid subscribers only, Dr John Wolstencroft is going to be writing for this Substack, sharing some of his investment ideas and research. I first met Dr John in 2006 at a dinner and talk by commodities trader...

After a month or so of welcome respite, the dreaded US dollar has got stronger again.  It really is the scourge of everything. Stockmarkets have been walloped, the yen, pound and euro have been walloped, and commodities have been walloped. Again. The US dollar index shows the dollar against the currencies of its major trading partners – the yen, the euro and so on – so it is perhaps the most usefu...

How did gold come into existence? No one really knows. Its origins are thought to lie in supernovae and the collision of neutron stars. It was present in the dust which formed the solar system four and a half billion years ago and came to earth via the asteroids that then bombarded the planet. According to the Bible, gold and silver are products of God. “The silver is mine, and the gold is mine, s...

Inflation in the UK has just hit 10.1%, says the Office for National Statistics.  That is five times the Bank of England’s stated target of 2%.  FIVE TIMES!  Sorry to shout.  The joy of the public sector is that you can be this bad at your job and still keep it.  Inflation hasn’t been this high in over 40 years. Are you prepared? None of this should be a surprise When you delve below the surface,...

John Stepek is leaving MoneyWeek.  I’ve known for a while, but as his final day was yesterday and we have just had his leaving drinks, so the implications are just sinking in.  I first started writing for MoneyWeek in 2006, which means John has been my editor for 16 years. Week in week out, he’s had to plough through my twaddle. I reckon I have written at least 800 Money Mornings in that time (one...

The Edinburgh Fringe Festival starts this week. It’s the world’s biggest arts festival, an event that sells more tickets than any other event in the world, with the exception of the Olympic Games. I shall be making my way up to Scotland’s capital to make my own little contribution, a new show that I haven’t finished writing yet (!), “a lecture with funny bits”, about the eternal subject that is we...

Are the people at the top – the directors – buying or selling shares in their own company? If they are buying, that’s usually a good sign. But if they’re selling, not so good. They might be selling because they need the money for something: to buy a property for example, to pay school fees, to settle some debts. Then again, they might be selling because they don’t like the look of what’s going on....

I was at a dinner the other night with a buddy who is a much cleverer investor than I am. The conversation went something like this. Clever Mate: “Inflation is 10%. Rates are going to have to go to 10% to get it under control. I’m 60% in cash.” Me: “The system can’t take rates at 10%.” Clever Mate shrugs.  There is an awkward silence. Clever Mate: “It will have to.” Another more awkward silence fo...

Metals are not going to stop crashing until the US dollar turns. I’ve been banging on about that for some time. I don’t know when that will be. Nor does anyone.  But this US dollar action feels like the parabolic blow-off that you get towards the end of bull markets, rather than the creeping disbelief you get at the beginning. I’m hearing talk of forex interventions coming. That may or may not be...

We suggested a couple of weeks back that oil might due a hit as seemed the only sector that hadn’t been walloped and so it has turned out.  Both Brent and West Texas Intermediate slid back below $100 a barrel joining metals on the downward slope.  Metals have been battered even harder, of course, with silver – as often seems to be the way – leading the fall downwards.  How can silver be trading be...

A week or so ago, the selling action in the stock market had grown so bad that a number of folks thought a crash was back on the cards. It started to feel like that again this week. But crashes are rare events. They don’t come along very often. The 21st century has seen two so far. That’s rather a lot by the standards of the previous century, when there were perhaps five or six in the US over the...

I haven’t covered the perennial disappointment that is gold for a while, and I felt the metal is overdue some attention, so that will be the subject of today’s missive.  I say perennial disappointment, because gold “should” be so much higher. In any case, it’s summer. Usually, the best time of year to buy each year is in the June to August timeframe, so perhaps it’s time to allocate some funds tha...

I keep thinking about that interview with Stanley Druckenmiller. Druckenmiller, a legend in US investing, worked with George Soros for many years, 12 of them as lead portfolio manager of Soros’s Quantum Fund, when he, among other things, spearheaded the infamous “Black Wednesday” raid on the pound in 1992 that forced the UK out of the European exchange rate mechanism (ERM). His own fund’s performa...

I wanted to discuss the natural resources industry today – energy and mining – because I see an industry caught between a rock and a hard place.  If I get a bit ranty, I apologise. But this impossible situation makes me get a little frothy at the mouth, because it is in large part so unnecessary – and not the making of the industry itself, but of idiotic policy. We, as investors, however, need to...