We fought Stein's Law...

And so far we're winning!

"I am reminded of the economist Herb Stein, who once said that, if something cannot go on forever, it will stop. To which Rudi Dornbusch quipped: Yes, but it will go on for a lot longer than you anticipate."

William White

“You've had [national debt] compounding at over 8% a year, with a growth in the GDP of about 4% a year, so you've got about a 4% per year gap over the last 50 years almost, so this is not sustainable. This is what you call insanity.”

Jonathan Wellum

"The press is saying delinquencies are at all-time lows. I think that's largely because we are missing huge chunks of the picture." - Melody Wright

Melody knows how the mortgage sausage is made. Very informative. (She only says "bloodbath" once by the way.)

"If you were using floating-rate bridge debt to get your deals to pencil in 2022 and 2023 - toast. Gone. Garbage. Complete garbage." - Michael Zuber

Via The Mad King, who I found through Grant Williams. Give his service a look.

“I've concluded that inflation could be a very misleading metric. Simply because we are looking at growth while ignoring levels…If inflation is under control, then why do consumers still feel priced out of everything? Answer: Because economic inflation data is calculated in a way that does not represent reality.” - TMK

“For instance, the US CPI equivalent of rent is up 22% since 2020, but median asking rent is up 41%. The price of a single-family house is up 40%, while financing costs are up 90%...”

“We need to get back to the Fed's actual statutory target which is 0% inflation.”

Tom McClellan

Via Grants:

“…the “magnificent seven” of Apple, Amazon, Tesla, Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft along with Jensen Huang’s outfit [Nvidia] command 31.4% of the S&P 500’s market capitalization.  That’s a record share per data from Bank of America, topping the 29% logged in late 2021 and double the group’s representation in the broad index at the end of 2017.”  

This was going to be a short post and now it’s a longer post. Today, below the fold, we have Matt Mattison, Jeff Gundlach, Jim Grant, Jason Shapiro, Danny Dayan, The Credit Strategist, H.L. Mencken, Atlanta, Boston, Dallas and Australia, capitalism, Skynet, and private equity, among other things.