Devolution of Financial Memory

Sophocles won 24 of the 30 literary competitions he entered, placing second in the rest. Of his 120-plus plays, only seven survive. Eratosthenes, calculated the Earth's circumference with breathtaking accuracy. As Chief Librarian of the Library of Alexandria he oversaw the collation of hundreds of thousands of works. But not even his own "On the Measure of the Earth" survived the Library's progressive destruction by war, negligence and cultural revolution.

Rashid-al-Din Hamadani created the first world history, taking advantage of his location at the crossroads of a Mongol empire with access to European, Arabic, Persian, Indian, Mongol and Chinese scholars. Hamadani, not wanting his masterpiece to be lost to time, arranged to have the work copied in Arabic and Persian every year and distributed. But his patron's death and royal intrigues cost him his station and us his work; no complete copy survives.

Several scholars, dizzy by the thought of humanity's lost knowledge, tried their hand at wistful, melancholy catalogues of what might have been. Thomas Browne wrote Musaeum Clausum, "an imagined inventory of 'remarkable books, antiquities, pictures and rarities of several kinds, scarce or never seen by any man now living.'" Besides Seneca's epistles to St. Paul, this hidden library houses history's most famous box within which was the perfume of infection responsible for the 17th century Plague of Milan.

Of course there's a difference between the tragedy of lost knowledge and the tomfoolery of what was willfully forgotten. It is the latter which financial market participants specialize in. John Kenneth Galbraith lamented that, "There can be few fields of human endeavor in which history counts so little as in the world of finance." James Grant concurs, laconically noting that, "Progress is cumulative in science and engineering, but cyclical in finance." And so, in Episode 45 the Rashid-al-Din of the Eurodollar will help us un-forget the three reflations since 2007 and how they compare to present-day. But first we review why US Treasury Bill Yields may be so low.

----------WHY----------
Part 01: There is a mainstream explanation for why US Treasury Bill rates are falling. There is also a Eurodollar / Shadow Money / Collateral System explanation. Jeff Snider reviews the two perspectives and looks ahead to where trouble may lay.

Part 02: We look through the lenses of the dollar, Treasury yields, inflation breakevens, swap spreads to see how this Post-Covid reflation compares to the three economic recoveries of the past 13 years: Green Shoots (2009-10), Global Growth (2012-14) and Globally Synchronized Growth (2016-18).

----------WHERE----------
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----------WHAT----------
Let’s Talk Bills (again): https://bit.ly/3q6tJs9
Hey Bill, *What* Is It?: https://bit.ly/3rs3Ov3
Hey Bill, *Why* Now?: https://bit.ly/2MGohxx
Reaching Half A Year, What’s The (Complete) Reflation Situation?: https://bit.ly/2OchADQ
Alhambra Investments Blog: https://bit.ly/2VIC2wW
RealClear Markets Essays: https://bit.ly/38tL5a7

----------WHO----------
Jeff Snider, Head of Global Investment Research for Alhambra Investments with Emil Kalinowski, piling the bologna high and deep. Evolutionary sketches by David Parkins aboard the HMS Beagle. Podcast intro/outro is "Stand Divided" by Deskant at Epidemic Sound.