markets
Uncle Sam Has Competition
Corporate borrowing has grown sharply in 2026, particularly to build AI infrastructure. Some of that debt competes with Treasuries for buyers, helping explain the rise in government borrowing costs.
What Is the Efficient Market Hypothesis?
A good company is not always a good investment. How market prices absorb information, why beating them is difficult, and where the efficient market hypothesis falls short.
What Is GDP?
Gross domestic product is a broad scorecard for an economy. What it counts, what it doesn't count, and why markets care so much when it changes.
Passive Investing Is an Active Bet
The S&P 500 now behaves like a 45-stock portfolio. Whether passive money caused that is genuinely contested, but the position it leaves you holding is not in dispute, and nobody chose it.
Bitcoin Priced in Gold
One bitcoin bought five hundred-thousandths of an ounce of gold in 2010. It buys around fifteen ounces now. The whole history fits on a log scale and nowhere else.
The S&P 500 Priced in Gold
Dividing one price by another removes the currency both are quoted in. What is left is 155 years of American equities measured against an ounce of gold.
The Buffett Indicator, 1947 to Today
US corporate equities as a share of GDP, from the post-war trough to the present. What the ratio measures, and what it does not.
Analyzing the effects of tariffs on prices and inflation
Tariffs are taxes on imports, and the evidence says Americans pay most of them. Whether they explain ongoing inflation is a narrower and much harder question.
Why has the Buffett Indicator Been Rising for Twenty Years?
The ratio has roughly doubled since 2006 and sits above every previous peak. The largest single reason is that the thresholds everyone quotes were calibrated on an economy whose corporate profit share no longer exists.