The 50-person gathering at Leen’s Lodge encompassed diverse political views, financial and economic specialties, and asset class focused from cannabis to currency trading, real estate to debt of all types, stock markets and ETFs, derivatives and futures, and more. Over $1 trillion in managed…

“A constitutional outrage” exclaimed the traditionally neutral House of Commons Speaker, John Bercow. “An affront to democracy … an intolerable attempt to silence Parliament,” declared the editorial in the August 29th Financial Times. These were reactions to Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s…

Brazil is poisoning the planet and now posing a growing existential risk. The country’s elected leader, Jair Bolsonaro, has suspended or rescinded environmental protection rules and favored his cronies in the agricultural and logging industries, who are exploiting the country’s resources with…

“Camp Kotok,” is a gathering of prominent economists, wealth managers, traders, heads of research, pundits, financial luminaries and a few journalists that meet each year in a remote part of Maine. Held for a long weekend in the summer, we fish and engage in vigorous debates running the gamut…

“Americans will always do the right thing — after exhausting all the alternatives.” Winston Churchill? Abba Eban? An Irishman? Apocryphal? For a history of the quote, see: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/11/11/exhaust-alternatives/ .

As David Kotok noted in his description of the intellectual discussions that occurred at Camp Kotok in Grand Lake Stream, Maine, one of the topics was so-called Modern Monetary Theory, or MMT.[1] There were four panelists, who were asked to take different sides for the sake of argument,…

George Santayana said “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Legislation has recently been introduced to require the Federal Reserve to develop a real-time payments system to compete with existing systems. Interestingly, a short time after the introduction of the legislation, the Federal Reserve announced its intention to proceed with plans to develop…

Katie Darden, Financial Institutions Research Director at S&P Global Market Intelligence, joined us at Camp Kotok and then published this excellent summary of our discussions: “At Camp Kotok, fears over China and 'magic money tree' overshadow Fed policy,” https://platform.mi.spglobal.com/web…

The past couple of weeks have been breathtaking for bond investors and observers of the bond market. The yield on the 30-year Treasury bond is now at a record low – it dipped under 2% this week – and the 10-year Treasury is not far off its record low of 1.36% set in July 2016 – the yield now…