Research theme

Capital Markets

Which strategies survive contact with the price of time.

We read what the market is actually pricing, where leverage is changing behavior, and when capital costs alter institutional choices.

Market ticker board with world index prices on a city street at night
Current signal

What we study

  • Rates and Liquidity

    Term premium, real yields, Fed balance sheet.

  • Credit

    Private credit, bank exposure, risk transfer.

  • Market Structure

    Index concentration and price discovery.

  • Capital Flows

    Treasury holders, reserves, dollar funding.

What we believe

The market and the state are racing to define the future of capital.

The thirty-year Treasury yield told the story of fiscal absorption before any budget document did. We read prices for what they reveal about funding conditions, the term premium, and which borrowers can still execute at a higher price of time. Intervention can move a price; only a change in policy can hold it there.

  1. The term premium, not the policy rate, is the number that matters.

    Long yields set the price of mortgages, corporate debt, and federal deficits, and the Federal Reserve does not control them.

  2. Debt has moved, not disappeared.

    Risk has migrated from bank balance sheets into private credit funds and insurers that report less and mark slower.

  3. Foreign reserves are now a funding-market variable.

    When Japan defends the yen through the Fed's repo facility instead of selling Treasuries, the dollar system is being managed to protect the U.S. bond market.

Latest Research

Essay

Unwinding Trump's Tariffs

Six exhibits trace the tariff unwind through federal revenue, China’s surplus, trade flows, consumer prices, and capital goods imports.

Sep 4, 202610 min
Memo

Jackson Hole and the Conditions for Credible Discretion

Kevin Warsh has pulled the Federal Reserve back from forward guidance. His first Jackson Hole address must show how a more restrained communications regime will preserve a clear monetary-policy rule.

Aug 26, 202611 min
Essay

The Yen Problem

Currency intervention moves a price. It does not replace the market mechanism. The yen is now the clearest live test of that distinction, and the outcome matters for how every government defends a currency it does not fully control.

Aug 14, 20265 min
Essay

The Arsenal as Portfolio

Prime contractors are acquiring options on the future industrial base with a rounding error of capital, and the sequence rather than the sum is what should concern policymakers.

Jul 27, 202613 min

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Key questions

  1. What is the market actually pricing?

  2. Where is leverage building beneath the surface?

  3. When does passive flow distort real signal?

  4. How do credit conditions transmit to policy?