Julian Brigden – Global Macro Series – 14th July 2020
Our guest in todays episode is Julian Brigden, co-founder of MI2 partners. Julian has decades experience in investment banking on both sides of the Atlantic, and is a true original thinker. We had a highly enjoyable conversation with Julian, who has a unique knack of explaining his frequently controversial views in a thoroughly entertaining fashion. He has a wide knowledge of topics as varied as silver and shale oil, and his historical references ranged from the 2008 crash all the way back to the Black Death in the middle ages.
Topics Discussed in this Episode
- The consistency of the US dollar cycle
- The COVID related March funding squeeze
- US current and capital account deficit
- Why Risk Parity strategies might be a bad idea going forward
- The many visible signs of āthe Fourth Turningā and why global markets are at an inflection point
- Unemployment
"The U.S. just hit post Second World War highs (for unemployment), and if you donāt, post Great Depression highs. The point is that we are starting in an economic hole which is, arguably, much, much deeper than many of our peers. And that is in virtue of the fact that we have a super flexible labor market"
- Why recent Federal Reserve liquidity injections into the market may not have been part of Quantitive Easing (QE), which could still be yet to come
āAs the economy starts to recover, thatās when we will come out with old fashioned QE." Iām like, āJesus, whatās that? Is that another 80 billion a month, trillion a year?ā And the answer is, āAlmost certainly.ā
- Yield curve control
- The independence of the Fed
- The case for Systematic Trend Following commodity funds
- Why Bitcoin may be a dangerous long-term investment
"(That) is the day that you are presented with the option of handing your bitcoin over in the same way that you did with gold in the ā30s or trying to keep hold of it and if youāre caught ending up in a big dark hole with a bloke called Bubba who calls you Shirley"
- Financial repression
- Why government bond yields may struggle to rise again
- The history of global pandemics
"There was this little bloke called Martin Luther who hung around as all the Catholic priests fled out to their country properties when we had the black death, who stayed and helped. Guess what? That was the cycle high of Catholicism. That was a relatively big turning point in History. Pandemics kind of do that"
- Commodity markets
- The case for Silver against the US dollar
- How market cycles tend to repeat themselves
- The importance of central bank policies when trying to gauge markets
Links
Catch up with Julian Brigden and learn more about his macroeconomic research firm, MI2Partners
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