Bummer about the timing of the separation from Odey.
They ended up making so much money on the British bonds turmoil that the funds had to close to new money as they figure out how to deploy the profits.
On the other hand it freed Mr. Bond up to tell this story.
Absolutely first-rate.
From the Financial Times' Alphaville outpost, November 4:
A former Odey Asset Management economist writes
Tim Bond was a partner at Odey Asset Management until March 2022, having joined in 2010 as its head of macroeconomic strategy, and managed the Odey Odyssey long-short macro fund. He is now senior non-executive director at The Law Debenture Corporation.
“You are effing useless,” was the informed verdict from management, as they myopically closed my hedge fund in the middle of 2021.
To be fair, the markets apparently held a similar opinion of my abilities. Anyone who had predicated their investments on rampant inflation and a dual bear market in bonds and equities was not looking too clever at that point.
Yet the call had seemed the most obvious of my career. Mixing massive money printing with massive fiscal easing can only ever have one possible outcome. Even the details about the LDI-inspired collapse in the gilt market were obvious enough, once you spent a few hours digging out the facts and applied a modicum of common sense. In fact, the only unexpected bit was me no longer running a fund when it all eventually happened. Effing useless, indeed.
It’s tempting today to assume that the worst might be over, at least for the markets, as monetary tightening precipitates an inflation-busting recession and the world returns to a familiar lowflation landscape. As likely as it might seem, such an outlook is impossible. The underlying economic condition of a structural slowdown in trend growth rates has not gone away.
What has gone away is our ability to hide the problem. QE, negative interest rates and rising indebtedness were the product and palliative of a condition caused by a prolonged deceleration in productivity growth to an average pace not seen since the 19th century.
Real wages stagnated for several decades on the back of this deceleration, whilst asset prices soared due to the evaporation of risk-free interest rates. By redistributing shares of wealth and income to the high-saving top 10 per cent, the economic mix ensured that demand and inflation fell short, simultaneously dismantling the social contract that keeps politics non-toxic. Meanwhile, zero interest rates worsened the productivity slowdown by artificially prolonging the lifespan of the least productive enterprises.Then came Covid....
....MUCH MORE
The comments are a cut above as well.
