Macroeconomics

Howard Marks is one of the two founders of Oaktree Capital Management. Oaktree is “…a leader among global investment managers specializing in alternative investments.” If the name sounds familiar it’s because they owned Boardriders (Quiksilver, DC Shoes, Roxy, Billabong, RVCA, Element, Vonzipper) after buying Quik and Billabong after their travails started. Oaktree, as you know, […]

You haven’t heard from me much.  Spent the last few months trying to figure out just how I could be useful to the industry.  I decided it wasn’t by analyzing publicly traded company filings.  Truth be told, that wasn’t fun for me anymore.  I also think covid/masks/lockdowns/caution changed my behavior.  Permanently?  Don’t know.  How about

In 5,000 years of recorded history, there isn’t another known instance of negative interest rates.  Now we’ve got about $13 trillion of securities with negative interest rates around the world.  So far, that hasn’t happened in the United States, but don’t assume it won’t when we finally get a recession. Money is a commodity.  It

The chart below is something you need to see to have some medium to long term perspective on the economy and the job market.  It comes under the heading of something you won’t see in the mainstream media.  I have finally been doing this long enough to know that people don’t always like it when

I stole the chart below from Clusterstock (It’s not stealing if you confess, is it?) and wanted to share it with you. Look at the unemployment rate for our prime customers; the young workers aged 16-24. It’s close to 20% as of May. Now, if you’re in skate you go younger than 16 and if you’re in apparel,

You can go here http://www.bls.gov/news.release/ecopro.nr0.htm to see the report. If it does help you sleep, it will probably give you nightmares. You can see in the first line of the report, released last Thursday, that they expect total employment "…to increase by 15.3 million, or 10.1 percent, during the 2008-18 period…" Now, that may sound encouraging, but

Daniel is my favorite economic indicator. He and his guys install wood floors. To get him to do some work at our house last summer, we had to book him two months in advance. When I called him to do another room not long ago he said, “How about next Tuesday?” He told me people were becoming more cautious