The record
All essays
The whole record, by year.
Each essay keeps its original date and address. Where the argument has since been tested, a later note at the foot of the page says how it came out. Nothing is rewritten to look wiser than it was.
2026
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Born in a downturn: why firms started in a recession stay small
A recession is counted in the year it happens. The firms founded during it carry it for decades, and the reason lies mostly with their customers, not their bank.
2023
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Fedbucks coming to a theatre near you this summer: FedNow, the SVB editorial, and a catalogue of recent Fed flops
The argument was that because the Fed had let the banks fail, the Fed should hold everyone's money directly. That is the fox applying for the henhouse on the strength of the feathers.
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The mad men of artificial intelligence: developers claim their creation verges on the godlike
The alarm was not raised by bystanders. It was raised, in writing, by the people with their hands on the machine, who then kept their hands on it.
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What a day: the 'non-systemic' collapse deepened systemically as the Fed's balance sheet jumped with 'not-QE'
Either the eleven largest banks in America are unusually kind, or they saw what the word 'systemic' was being used to deny.
2022
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Fed up and under-fed at the same time: tightening a labour market that is short of people
The plan was to lay off workers who were already too few, to reduce production that was already lower than the year before, to lower prices that were high because production was short.
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Cashless-society talk goes mainstream in a hurry, and should be trusted about as far as the NSA
A year earlier the claim got you called a conspiracy theorist. By November 2022 it was a panel title.
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The money of the apocalypse: the New York Fed's digital-dollar pilot, announced the week FTX collapsed
Central bank digital currency had been a paper subject for years. In one week it acquired a pilot, a list of banks and a crisis to justify it.
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A recessional for the recession: everyone sings the strong-labour-market tune in unison, and the tune is wrong
A recessional is the hymn sung while the congregation files out. In 2022 it was sung to make the recession leave the room.
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Real GDP says: get real. The second negative quarter of 2022 and the consumer who was never strong
Consumers spent more money and took home less. That is not resilience. It is inflation measured in the wrong units.
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An apocalypse upon us: how much more can one summer take?
Any three of these would have made a bad year. In July 2022 they were all on the same page of the newspaper.
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The inflation monster: it is worse than we thought, and it has not grown up yet
Monetary expansion creates inflation where the money flows. For twelve years it flowed into assets. The question was where it would go when the assets fell.
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The retail apocalypse was bloodier than it looked
Revenue looked fine, considering. Considering what, was the whole story.
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US economy crashes into recession: the first-quarter 2022 GDP report
Two days earlier the most bearish bank on Wall Street had given a recession a one-in-three chance a year out. Then the number came in.
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The Federal Reserve crashes the plane en route to a soft landing
Two pilots tried to swap planes in mid-air over Arizona that weekend. One plane went into the ground. The Fed's flight plan was more ambitious.
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The relentless march of inflation to the drumbeats of war
Some of it was the war. Some of it was the response to the war. All of it landed on top of an inflation that was already the highest in forty years.
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Seeing it all come together: bonds, the yield curve and the end of the Fed's taper
For two years the Fed was the whale in the bond pool. On 9 March 2022 it climbed out, and the water level did what water levels do.
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Federal job fakery hits peak balderdash: the January 2022 payrolls report
The unemployment rate rose in the same report that showed a hiring boom. Both were true, and neither meant what the headline said.
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The next recession is here: reading the fourth-quarter 2021 GDP report under the hood
You cannot see the intruder, and you do not think he is in the house yet. But you can smell the cigarette smoke through the bedroom window.
2021
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The tax-and-vaccinate plan may be the straw that breaks the camel's back: shortages, ports and stagflation in September 2021
Millions who left the workforce in the lockdown had not come back. The policy response was to remove more.
2020
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The coronacrisis turns the buyback billionaires into the trillion-dollar dozen
Congress said no bailout money could go to buybacks. It did not say no buybacks. Money is fungible, and the companies knew it.
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Cashless society 2020: how the coronavirus swung the public toward touch-free money, digital ID and a digital dollar
People who would never have voted for a cashless society will accept one to avoid touching a stranger's money. That was the lesson of the spring.
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Digital ID, vaccination certificates and the cashless argument: what was actually proposed in 2020
Three real things and the story that was built from them. The certificates were real, the research was real, the cashless preference was real. The tattoo that let you into a stadium was not.
2019
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Bond primer: does an inverted yield curve indicate a recession?
Correlation is not causation, said the former Fed chair. When the same thing follows the same action every time for forty-five years, the distinction wears thin.
2018
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It's up, it's down, it's done: a day in the year of the Dow
Whoever was pushing the market up on the last Friday of 2018 pushed harder than anyone had ever pushed. It fell anyway.
2017
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Central banks buying stocks: how the Swiss and Japanese central banks came to own the American market
A former Fed governor had said on television that the Fed front-loaded the rally. The question in 2017 was who was still buying, and the answer was in Zurich and Tokyo.
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A list of seven troubles assailing the US economy heading into summer 2017
This is not a list of things that might go wrong. It is a list of things that were going wrong, with the dates.
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2017 economic headwinds: housing bubbles popping up, and popping, everywhere
The push to get back to 2006 took seven years and the same loosening of credit that got there the first time. Real wages had not moved.
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The inevitability of economic collapse: the flaws that were not fixed after 2008
Trends determine ends. Nothing on this list had been fixed, little was being attempted, and the new administration proposed to loosen what restraints there were.
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More fake news: how honest photographs were used to shrink an inauguration crowd
Sometimes it is not the lie you tell but the truth you select.
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Fake news: the establishment media devours itself over the dossier
CNN did not publish the dossier. It published the directions to it, and then argued for a week that the two were different.
2016
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Wikileaks and Syria: what the Clinton email archive said about Libya, Iran and Israel
Neither document mentions ISIS. Both mention Israel and Iran. That is the whole of the argument, and it should be read as exactly that much.
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This graph says it all: the 2016 recession was already here
Twelve per cent growth after the war, eight per cent for thirty years, four after that, and now a recovery that could not reach three. The line only goes one way.
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What was going on with banks in April 2016: emergency meetings, a bail-in and the worst quarter since 2009
Two closed-door Fed meetings, a presidential visit, a G-20, an Austrian bail-in and an Italian rescue fund, all inside seven days. What each of them meant, and what they added up to.
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The cashless-society war intensifies: the record of 2015 and 2016, country by country
The prediction was that a global crisis would deliver a global cashless money. The crisis came in instalments; the cashless part came without one.
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2016 economic predictions: the year of the Epocalypse
A word was needed for economic, epoch, collapse and apocalypse at once. The year was expected to earn it.
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A Fed official confesses: the Fed front-loaded the stock rally, and a correction is coming
For six years the existence of a 'Fed put' was denied by the Fed and by most of Wall Street. Then a man who had sat at the table described it, cheerfully, on television.
2012
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An idiot's guide to quantitative easing: what QE is, how it works, and why bad news became good news
The Fed cannot buy the government's bonds from the government. So it lets the banks buy them first, and buys them from the banks a few days later, at a premium. That is the whole trick.
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Deficits, debts and Democrats versus Republicans: the US national debt by year and by president
Conventional wisdom says Republicans run the economy better. Two long series, one on income and one on debt, say something less comfortable for both parties.