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Anecdote: Storms roll in fast here, angry squalls, then they’re gone, racing across the valley, dark, menacing, northward toward Yellowstone. High in the mountains, early spring’s grass is of the most vibrant green, the sweet but brief reward of a hard life, the eternal struggle. There was a time not so long ago when this land was owned by no one. Native Americans coming and going. And here we are, at property prices

Hope all goes well… On Friday, Aug 5, 2011, Standard and Poor’s lowered America’s AAA credit rating. The S&P 500 index fell 7% in the subsequent session to 1120. The VIX index surged from 22.5 to 48.3. Even though S&P had downgraded US creditworthiness, 10-year treasury yields fell 22bps to 2.34% as investors rushed to “safety.” The Swiss Franc gained 2%. Gold jumped 3% to $1,717. Bitcoin fell from $12.56 to

Anecdote: Ethereum (ETH) rallied 35% this week. It’s the kind of move that raises eyebrows, even for crypto traders. It’s still lower year-to-date – been a dog. Ethereum was designed to be the infrastructure upon which a new financial system would be built. At first it was too slow and expensive. That’s when I first saw its potential, with Ethereum at $425. There was a future state where all global financial tr

Hope all goes well… “I’d go to California or a really wealthy European city with a high degree of scientific knowledge,” said the CIO. We were discussing shifting global orders, opportunities, and I asked where he’d move to if he were 25 again. “California first, to learn something, and then Europe to build, where it’s a bit easier and you may have a lot more support looking out over 5yrs.” He grew up in the US, live

Anecdote: Quantico, Virginia. The U.S. Marines Basic School in our rear-view mirror. Minutes after graduation, in the parking lot, my oldest son swapped his uniform for civvies, and we hit the road. Jeep packed to the roof, boxes of crap, uniforms, gear. Always moving. I’m still not sure how we became a military family, three of our four kids now committed, our youngest leaning that way. It’s been another one of life

Hope all goes well… “Please find time to watch this video [here],” I texted to Liv, Teddy, Charlie, and Jackson on our family app. “It’s a lecture that was supposed to have been given recently at the Naval Academy but was not. It’s outstanding, on multiple levels.” Our military academies regularly invite exceptional speakers to address their cadets. Such lectures focus on character development, integrity, leadership,

Hope all goes well… My Dad died today, unexpectedly, mercifully, it was his time. He was a great man, lived a good life, not easy in many ways, but filled with adventure, risk taking, the outdoors. He was a kind soul, who believed in peace through strength, advancing our nation’s aerospace and defense technologies. He taught his five children so many things, but above all, the importance of forgiveness. And in this,

Hope all goes well… Dusted off a hopeful anecdote from 15 years ago, from around the time I started publishing, back when the world was still healing from the GFC, and Europe was yet to fully realize the depth of its debt crisis. It feels like we’ve got a long road to travel to get to the other side of our latest turmoil, so much of it self-inflicted, senseless. But there’s always the underlying force of humanity’s d

Anecdote: A crisis that caught the imagination of the western world was the UK’s exit from Europe’s Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) on September 16, 1992. We called that Black Wednesday. I was 25, Lehman London, just young and dumb enough to find it not particularly surprising. I was trading short term interest rates at the time, and along with the UK’s central bank, Sweden had also been intervening in increasingly fra

Hope all goes well… “I guess they say it was the biggest day in financial history,” said President Trump Wednesday, his unexpectedly quick capitulation from a self-inflicted policy catastrophe had sparked a surge in stock prices. “Nobody’s ever heard of it. It’s gonna be a record,” he boasted, the cameras clicking. The stock market had been in freefall, as had the US dollar and the Treasury market, which is just the