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Economics brain food

Glenn Loury is preparing to host a conference at the Hoover Institute, honouring the life and works of Thomal Sowell. To that end, he is hosting a number of conversations on his podcast. The first one with Emily Skarbek, associate economics professor at Brown University, and the second with Jason Riley, columnist for the WSJ, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. They’re great conversations even if you, like me, are not familiar with the works and life of Thomas Sowell. TS, still going strong in his 90s, writes and thinks about core principles of economic thought, social life, individual responsibility and rights, and it is great to hear Glenn and his guests flex their intellectual muscles on these topics. I’d add to these two a recent Econtalk episode in which Russ Roberts sits down with his friend, and long-time guest on Econtalk, Mike Munger to discuss the question of what capitalism is.

We could all use a space online to unplug once in a while, especially in our current moment. For that purpose, you could do a lot worse than listening to the conversations above.

Global Leading Indicators, August 2025 - Who's afraid of payrolls anyway?

Global leading indicators remained robust heading into autumn, despite softening compared to levels at the start of the year. Uncertainty always lurks in financial markets, and currently, (at least) three major questions are weighing on investors—threatening the ongoing optimism in the global economy and financial markets:

U.S. Trade Policy and Tariffs: Did the White House, back in April, effectively throw a boomerang that's now returning to hit both the U.S. and global economy in the face?
Sustainability of the AI Investment Boom: Is the surge in tech and AI-exposed equities evidence of a genuine transformation, a bubble that is about to pop with predictably adverse consequences for markets and the economy.
Global Bond Market Sell-Off: Investors are raising questions about long-term fiscal sustainability in the U.S., U.K., France, and Japan, even speculating about the erosion of monetary policy independence in the U.S. A crisis of confidence in one or more of these large bond markets could trigger turbulence across opaque, illiquid private credit markets, spilling over into the real economy.

Equity sector rotation chartbook Aug 2025 - Order is restored, for now

As I wait for the September update of the OECD leading indicators—producing data for July and August—I thought I’d introduce another chartbook I've been working on, this time focused on equity sectors. It replicates a variation of a Bloomberg function I used to rely on when I had access to a terminal, the Relative Rotation Graphs - RRG. Since transitioning to Macrobond as the main source of data in my day job, I no longer look at this tool as frequently as I’d like. To that end, I’ve built my own version using the SPDR S&P 500 sector ETFs, and the SPY along with the VEU, to capture the relative performance of sectors and global equities. The total return data comes from Investing.com, where I have a personal premium subscription.

Markets and Tradingclaus vistesenAugust 31, 2025equities, equity sectors, chartbooks

A question of time

I’ve been thinking about time recently. In economics and finance, time is central to our analysis. Most of the information we care about, after all, is spread and dispersed across time. As a result, the way we embed our models with information, and how we sort and organize that information, is often a question of time. The information embedded in time is powerful, often overwhelming.

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