Confluence Podcasts

Where does the extra liquidity flow? Bill O'Grady, Chief Market Strategist, addresses this key inflation question, especially in light of the Fed's recent policy actions.

In our “2020 Geopolitical Outlook,” we named the 2020 U.S. election as a key event. Our recent five-part Weekly Geopolitical Report series examined this issue in more detail. This is the second of three podcast episodes that will look at the 2020 election. In this episode, Chief Market Strategist Bill O'Grady discusses the issue of inequality and the rise of populism, the impact of social media, and the current problems of extreme partisanship and political legitimacy.

What is the impact of inequality on monetary policy? Bill O'Grady, Chief Market Strategist, addresses this question, primarily regarding racial inequality, in this week's episode.

Will the Fed implement negative interest rates? Bill O'Grady, Chief Market Strategist, examines whether this event may occur.

In our “2020 Geopolitical Outlook,” we named the 2020 U.S. election as a key event. Our recent five-part Weekly Geopolitical Report series, which concludes this week, examines this issue in more detail. This is the first of three podcast episodes that will look at the 2020 election. In this episode, Chief Market Strategist Bill O'Grady discusses the concept of public goods, who benefits from them and who pays, the concept of the identity/class nexus, the fluidity of political party affiliation, and the risks to fixed investment that come from the inability to build a political consensus.

We continue to build on themes discussed in episode #11, “The Lessons of History,” in which we examined the effects of earlier pandemics. In this episode, we discuss how the COVID-19 pandemic will likely accelerate the reversal of the equality/efficiency cycle toward equality. Deglobalization is a key element of that shift. Although we believe the world has been steadily moving toward equality, this pandemic is moving the process forward. The eventual outcome is higher inflation, although it may take several years for higher price levels to become evident.

This episode examines the economic, market and social effects of earlier pandemics. Although the Black Death is mentioned, we focus on relatively recent events, including the Spanish influenza. One of our themes has been an impending reversal in the equality/efficiency cycle; in this podcast we discuss the potential that the pandemic could accelerate the shift to an equality phase.

This episode discusses the two updates to our 2020 Outlook, in which we have moved from “storm watch” to “storm warning.” In the podcast, we note the three factors that have put the U.S. into recession—the pandemic, rising financial stress and the oil crisis. Our current take is that the recession will be deep, the deepest since the Great Depression, but likely short, given the aggressive policy response.

This episode discusses Confluence’s asset allocation process. In earlier episodes, Bill O’Grady examined the importance of process when investors are making decisions under conditions of uncertainty, while Mark Keller talked about the process for managing the firm’s value-oriented equity strategies. In this podcast, Greg Ellston, Confluence’s CIO of Asset Allocation, discusses the investment team’s process for managing the asset allocation strategies.

This episode discusses Confluence’s 2020 Geopolitical Outlook. We examine the U.S. 2020 elections, the situation in Iran, China’s debt, the impact of demographics and North Korea. We also provide an update on emerging issues since we published the report in mid-December.