A good note from Ralph Sueppel on the relationship between market volatility and macroeconomic uncertainty.
Macro uncertainty as predictor of market volatility
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"Economy" Posts
The many unsolved issues of the Christmas Brexit deal
“It ain’t over till it’s over”, said the baseball legend Yogi Berra. And Brexit is surely not over with this Christmas deal. Many issues remain unsolved.
The Brexit deal brings no special treat to the UK’s financial sector
While economists and journalists pour into the 1,200+ pages of the Brexit treaty and its long-term impact, the financial services are already seen as the big missing part. The Square Mile is getting worried.
Fifty years of tax cuts for rich didn’t trickle down, LSE says
That will not be to everybody’s taste…
A study from the London School of Economics of 18 OECD countries over the last 50 years confirms that reducing taxes only impacts those directly touched by the tax, and has no benefit to anyone else. Tax cuts increase inequality with no impact on economic growth and unemployment.
Fridges are the new rocket science
Fridges are the new rocket science… IBM’s target of a million-qubit requires the biggest and coolest fridge ever.
The article is also a good overview of where quantum computers are, and where they will be. Quantum computers will be exponentially better at some tasks, but not at all tasks. Excel will still run on your desktop; high-dimensional problems (investments! back-tests! optimizations!) would fit well in quantum computers. The next generation of software will separate tasks and send them to either/or, thanks to cloud-based quantum capacity.
France declares second national lockdown
No benefit in being alarmist, and there are far too many people talking about COVID than needed. But the markets remain ‘truth midwives”, and today’s market fall is explained by these points:
– The resurgence covid resurgence is much larger this Fall than it was in Spring.
– Europe (not just France), needs to re-instore solid prophylactic measures. There are now curfews in large French cities.
– While Europe is in a second wave, whose roots probably come from frustration and the abnormal strength of this virus, the US is still in its first wave. The recent US resurgence is only the virus reaching states, which it had not yet infected. There’s probably worse to come in the US.
Mind the Gap: Diversification and inequality
Simple and interesting reading. Imagine we all started in life with the same wealth and randomly generated profits by trading with each other. The first winners benefit from diversification, and tend to increase their wealth.
=> A fair economy naturally converges towards an unequal society.
In other words, even with equal skills and no inheritance, some of us will become the 1%. By pure luck.
That would have been a touchy Thanksgiving topic…
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