Ben Hunt PhD's Blog

Brexit is a Bear Stearns moment, not a Lehman moment. That's not to diminish what's happening (markets felt like a death in March 2008), but this isn't the event to make you run for the hills. Why not? Because it doesn't directly crater...

A policy-controlled market, whether it’s today’s investment environment or the 1930s or the 1870s, places enormous pressure on investors—for yield and consistent return, to be sure, but even more so for a resurrection

Edward Tufte is a personal and professional hero of mine. Professionally, he’s best known for his magisterial work in data visualization and data communication through such classics as The Visual Display of Quantitative...

I’ve had four or five true migraines in my life, mostly from getting whacked on the head with something like a baseball or a sharp elbow in basketball, and I honestly can’t imagine how horrible it must be to suffer from chronic migraines...

In the second half of 2014, export volumes in every major economy on Earth began to decline, the result of divergent monetary policies that crystallized with the Fed’s announced tightening bias in the summer of 2014. This decline in trade...

For the past six plus years, ever since the Fed launched QE1 in March 2009, we have lived in an era I’ve described as the Golden Age of the Central Banker, where the dominant explanation for why market events occur as they do has been...

The susceptibility of credit spreads to systemic risk(s) that I was describing last month was borne out last week. Protection on the ITRAXX senior European financial debt index widened by over 45 bps from 92 bps at the close of January to 137 bps at the close on February 8...

I'm going full-nerd with the "Lord of the Rings" introduction to today's Epsilon Theory note, but I think this scene—where Denethor, the mad Steward of Gondor, orders his son Faramir to take on a suicide mission against Sauron's overwhelming...

The world made two discoveries last week. Everyone is aware of the first discovery – that ISIS is not “a junior varsity team” but an able protagonist in what Pope Francis quite rightly calls “a piecemeal third World War”. Very few are aware of the second discovery – the existence of...

This is the concluding Epsilon Theory note of a trilogy on coping with the Golden Age of the Central Banker, where a policy-driven bull market has combined with a machine-driven market structure to play you false.