The Wednesday Letter 180 - 9 August 2023
THIS WEEK: To Our Readers; Federal Age Limits; Fitch's Debt Downgrade; The Empire Strikes Back; Wage Inflation; S&P Sectors Update.
TO OUR READERS
Dear Reader,
The first Wednesday Briefs, posted on March 4th 2020 at the start of the COVID pandemic, was indeed brief. It included three sections, one on the pandemic, one on politics and one on the markets. It was in hindsight wildly optimistic on the pandemic, though even these figures seemed large in those early days:
"We assume this spike in a bad-case scenario at between 100,000 and 200,000 US infected, resulting in 500 to 5,000 deaths."
It was better on politics...:
"Because of Biden’s current strong momentum, there is a possibility that he will gain a majority of the delegates before the convention, which would automatically make him the nominee on the first round."
... and even better on the markets:
"The near unanimous view that markets will not recover quickly probably means that they will. The sell-off was fast and furious an…