• Some clarification on COVID and the current media coverage

• How the result of “financialization” is to ignore capital investment, and how starving the economy of capital spending deprives it of future productivity

• The stress of the stress tests!

• The lost decade of gold is a powerful antidote to the strange argument that central bank abuses are bullish for gold. If the last decade wasn’t the golden era of central bank libertinism, I don’t know what was. And yet gold is just now trying to get back within striking distance of where it was ten years ago??

• A refresher on our friend, Illiquidity, and why behavioral finance drives the return premium in private market assets – a section that should get its own dedicated Dividend Cafe!

• How good/bad is the economic “recovery” going?

• And the secret sauce on how politics works in conjunction with markets … what we expect out of the next few months as various political scenarios play themselves out

• The Chart of the Week looks at the three stages of the COVID era …

Links mentioned in this episode: