For decades now, interest rates have plummeted, bringing the cost of borrowing to all-time lows. Over the same period, the digital revolution has brought down operating costs faster than at any time in human history. This secular deflation in the financing and operation of businesses has been one of the largest defining economic trends of the past half century. But it has come to an end, predicts Grant Williams, publisher of the Things That Make You Go Hmmm... newsletter and co-founder of Real Vision. The events of 2020 have dramatically accelerated a reversal from the past decades of deflation into a new future of secular inflation. And that means the rules of investing have just changed, as the playbooks for those two environments are extremely different. Not only will many of today's investors be caught flat-footed by this reversal, but so will our financial "experts" warns Grant. It has been so long since we've experienced sustained inflation that very few fund managers, traders and stock brokers are left who have the expertise to know how to handle it.
Grant Williams is the portfolio manager of the Vulpes Precious Metals Fund and strategy advisor to Vulpes Investment Management in Singapore. Grant has 28 years of experience in finance on the Asian, Australian, European and US markets and has held senior positions at several international investment houses, including Robert Fleming, UBS and Credit Suisse. Since 2009, he has also been writing the popular investment newsletter Things That Make You Go Hmmm...
Adam Taggart is the President and Co-Founder of Peak Prosperity. He wears many hats, but his basic job is to handle the business side of things so that his fellow co-founder, Chris Martenson, is free to think and write. Adam is an experienced Silicon Valley internet executive and Stanford MBA. Prior to partnering with Chris (Adam was General Manager of our earlier site, ChrisMartenson.com), he was a Vice President at Yahoo!, a company he served for nine years. Before that, he did the 'startup thing' (mySimon.com, sold to CNET in 2001). As a fresh-faced graduate from Brown University in the early 1990s, Adam got a first-hand look at all that was broken with Wall Street as an investment banking analyst for Merrill Lynch. Most importantly, he's a devoted husband and dad.