TradeSmith Daily

November 2020

How Green Regulation Could Help Save the Oil and Gas Industry

November 3, 2020John Banks

What’s good for investors is sometimes terrible for the U.S. economy, and what’s good for the economy is sometimes terrible for investors. You know that old saying, “What’s good for General Motors is good for America”? Sometimes, that saying is completely backwards. What is bad for an industry can be wonderful for America on the whole — and vice versa. The all-time champion of this phenomenon is the oil and gas industry in the aftermath of the shale revolution. The

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The Crucial Differences Between Monetary Policy and Fiscal Policy

November 2, 2020John Banks

October 2020 was an ugly month for the U.S. stock market. The Dow, S&P 500, and Nasdaq Composite all declined more than 2%, registering their second down month in a row. Some will attribute this market weakness to pre-election jitters. In our view, it is more a reflection of post-election jitters — that is to say, what happens in the months after the election, rather than what happens with the election itself. For the stock market, the immediately relevant question

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October 2020

Why Central Bank Digital Currencies Will Arrive Faster Than You Think

October 27, 2020John Banks

Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) are likely to arrive faster than you think. This is partly because they will not be true cryptocurrencies. CBDCs will be centralized, whereas true cryptocurrencies are decentralized. This makes a big difference. The decentralized aspect of a cryptocurrency is what makes it distributed and trustless – meaning there is no requirement to trust a third party in facilitating an exchange. . Because it is decentralized — not governed from a central server or a single

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Solar Energy is Dethroning Old King Coal

October 26, 2020John Banks

Solar power is now “the cheapest electricity in history,” according to new data from the International Energy Agency (IEA). On a cost-comparison basis, the economics of solar energy are superior to coal for new projects, and by midcentury (2025), solar could have a larger global energy footprint than coal. This is a profound turning point, because coal has been a cost-effective energy source for thousands of years. There are Greek references to coal use in metalworking that date back to

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Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) are Having a Moment

October 21, 2020John Banks

We are now barreling headlong into the Information Age, the fourth great age of human civilization. The prior three, as we’ve explained before, were the Stone age, the Agrarian age, and the Industrial age. The Stone Age gave us tools, the Agrarian Age gave us farming techniques, and the Industrial Age gave us factories and physical machines. Now the Information Age is giving us the digitization of the physical world, the merging of the physical and the virtual. This physical-virtual

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Why the U.K. Government May Need to Crash Its Own Currency

October 19, 2020John Banks

The United Kingdom is headed for a “No Deal Brexit” break-up with the European Union. This assessment is based on harsh statements coming directly from Boris Johnson, the U.K. Prime Minister. If a “No Deal Brexit” happens, or even just an exceptionally “Hard” Brexit, the result could be a hammer blow for the British economy. That, in turn, could force the U.K. government to devalue the British pound aggressively, or even crash it, to try and steer the U.K. economy

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A New Wave of Infection is Hitting the U.S. and Europe — and a Fiscal Wave Will Follow

October 16, 2020John Banks

It would not be correct to say the coronavirus is back — because it never actually left. We can say, however, that coronavirus caseloads are surging again on two continents. The numbers are starting to look alarming, and it isn’t even truly cold yet. (The winter months are expected to make the pandemic worse, due to reduced outdoor activities, lower humidity levels, and greater exposure to indoor circulated air.) In the United States, daily coronavirus cases topped 63,000 on Oct.

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The Polls Aren’t Wrong. Nor Were They Wrong in 2016

October 14, 2020John Banks

In recent days, we’ve written about the “Biden Sweep” scenario, and how Wall Street has come to embrace it as a bullish expectation. The thing that Wall Street fears is a government spending cut-off that leaves the U.S. economy in a deflationary hole. If policy gridlock cuts off the anticipated flow of upcoming spending, permanent job loss and recessionary scars could take down the U.S. economy and the stock market, too. If Democrats take the levers of power in the

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