“Videos posted on social media showed security agents and groups of soldiers beating up demonstrators on Sunday. Protesters ripped up portraits of Fidel Castro, while others destroyed police motorbikes and overturned police cars.” Those are the words of Wall Street Journal reporters Jose de Cordoba and Santiago Perez. Hopefully the video images downloaded from the streets of […]
If you are reading this, congratulations on surviving the latest Independence Day festivities, which our society somewhat arbitrarily celebrates on 4 July. Independence Day 2026 will mark the nation’s 250th ‘birthday’, but Americans that day may not party like it’s 1999. What will America’s quarter millennial/semiquincentennial look like? I vaguely recall the nation’s celebration of […]
Originally published February 2021. For investors, the recent decline in retail property performance might suggest opportunity for acquiring property at distressed pricing. The challenge for such investors is to identify discounts associated with the covid-induced recession versus discounts associated with the structural distress in the retail sector. Investors might similarly expect distressed opportunity to emerge […]
Originally published 12 November 2020. As I write this, we still don’t know who won the presidency. It is, however, time to declare at least one winner. After almost sixty years of fighting, it’s clear that the War on Drugs is almost over and drugs have won. As the Associated Press reports, recreational marijuana has been […]
Suppose you lent someone $100 and when they paid you back they only handed you, say, $99 or $80. Would you consider the borrower to have kept his promise and contractual obligation? Or would you think that he had cheated you out of a part of the money you had lent him in good faith? […]
Sure, the sector suffered last year, but it’s overcome troubles before and will do so again. Real estate investment trusts, or REITs, were misunderstood for years after they debuted in 1960 – even for decades. When they were first written into law, they were little known and little appreciated. Institutional investors simply did not trust […]
Many parts of the economy have suffered no ill effects from Covid – the US government should restrain its largesses One year after the emergence of covid as a threat to our daily existence, a peculiar narrative has taken hold whereby the undoubted turmoil of the past 12 months is being treated as a general […]
Sales of new single-family homes rose sharply in March, increasing 20.7% to 1.021 million at a seasonally adjusted annual rate from a 846,000 pace in February. Sales are an astonishing 66.8% above the year ago level (see top of first chart). Sales were up in three of the four regions of the country in March […]
This article was originally published in June 2020. Market volatility is at an historic extreme. From a technical perspective, post-pandemic US stock markets are behaving in a manner unseen in price history, making multi-year lows and highs in a matter of weeks. Liquidity comes at a price. Read on to better understand why volatility is the price […]
Total housing starts rose to a 1.739 million annual rate from a 1.457 million pace in February, a 19.4% increase. The March recovery was expected as weather conditions in significant portions of the country were unfavourable in February and significantly depressed activity. From a year ago, total starts are up 37.0%. The dominant single-family segment […]
