Videos Of The Week
A Gut Feeling On Ukraine And The Middle East, Gold On The Yield Curve & A Look At The Commodities Space
I killed a couple braincells watching the debate last week and I don’t have a whole lot to say. People can complain about the moderators, but I don’t think the debate is going to sway a bunch of undecided votes. On the geopolitical front, Ukraine is still a mess, and I think it’s a fantastic idea for the US to allow Ukraine to hit Russia with long range missiles. In all seriousness, the sooner the West wakes up to the reality in Ukraine, the faster things get resolved. That requires some logical horsepower and the desire of our leaders to do what is best for their countries, which seems unlikely given recent history.
Hopefully we see things start to trend in a better direction in Ukraine and in the Middle East, but from what I have seen from
and Daniel Davis that might be a long shot. We will see what happens, but I just have this feeling that we are going to see something big in Ukraine or the Middle East before the election. I hope I’m wrong, and it’s just a gut feeling, but in both cases the West and their allies are in interesting situations to say the least.Hedgeye Real Conversations w/ Judy Shelton
I have talked about gold on the yield curve in a couple of past podcasts, and unless I’m mistaken, that idea came from Judy Shelton, who was a guest on a recent Hedgeye podcast. I think at some point we will see the option to redeem treasuries (at least partially) for gold, but when that happens is hard to guess. Instead of rambling on with a summary of the video, I wanted to leave a couple quotes that stood out to me.
I think that we might be misdiagnosing what’s happening in the economy in general. I think it’s very important to get a better handle on the impact of migrant labor, and I think that affects productivity numbers. I think a lot of people that are actually working that might be counted as jobs, but if people are concerned about their legal status, they might not report that…. I think we need to get better statistics about the impact of these dynamic changes in the economy before we make pronouncements about why we see strong consumer demand, why we see strong economic growth.
I view money as a moral contract between citizens and the government, and I think it’s incumbent on the government to provide a meaningful unit of account, and a dependable store of value.
- Judy Shelton
Money of Mine w/ Le Shrub
This was one of my favorite podcasts of the week and covered several sectors of interest. I’m hoping to have him on the podcast at some point in the future, but they talked about his thoughts on commodities, and the recent flush in several sectors. They also covered passive flows and the Nvidia NVDA 0.00%↑ casino. If you’re interested in platinum, tin, coal, or commodities in general, you will enjoy this one.
In It To Win It w/ Matt Warder
If you want to focus specifically on the coal sector, Matt Warder had a good podcast appearance talking about the current state of coal and stocks of interest. He talked about real price discovery for met coal versus traders liquidating and the potential impact of the Presidential election on the sector. They covered the Arch Resources ARCH 0.00%↑ and Consol CEIX 0.00%↑ merger along with the other major stocks. It hasn’t been a great stretch for coal stocks as of late, but we will see if that starts to change.