Max Osbon's Posts

One of my pet peeves is loose generalized commentary about “The Market” on CNBC, WSJ, etc. The real story will always be found in the specifics, typically just one layer deep into the data. What you will find when you look under the hood is that all commentary about “the market” today has become commentary about the tech sector. The…

Happy July 4th! This is the United States’ 249th birthday. The upcoming 250th is also known as the semiquincentennial (half of 500 years).   Onchain Flood Gates Robinhood gets all the credit for being a top financial innovator over the past decade. They were the first to introduce zero trading fees, which ultimately forced Fidelity, Schwab and others to follow….

Quick bites during the Summer heatwave   Private Credit Tax Break Proposal There is a proposal in the Big Beautiful Bill that would limit the tax on dividends from private credit BDCs, Business Development Companies. BDCs are a wrapper similar to a REIT, Real Estate Investment Trust. Instead of holding real estate, BDCs hold debt. Private credit produces income taxed…

Here are some quick notes during the holiday: I titled this “Crypto is Small” to emphasize the enormous gap between current traditional financial markets and crypto. Most people tend to think of crypto as an oddly persistent unserious asset class. The short history of crypto is punctuated by many brief parabolic growth curves, memes, NFTs, and excessive fraud and speculation….

Shifting Sands One detail I wanted to highlight is the Fed Balance Sheet which has shrunk by a remarkable amount since its peak in 2022 at $8.95T to $6.67T today. I labeled this section ‘shifting sands’ because while a nearly $2.5T reduction in the balance sheet is both a record and historically significant, it’s been offset by other lesser known…

Stablecoins Circle may finally IPO in the coming weeks or months. Circle launched in Boston in 2013 and is known for its stablecoin USDC. Stablecoins are fractional internet native programmable money market funds. In terms of global dollar dominance, almost all stablecoins are denominated in USD. There is $250B currently in USD stablecoins vs $580M in EUR stablecoins. Anyone in…

Dollar Impact, Dollar Network Even though US equity markets have recovered from their Liberation Day lows, most people instinctively suspect that Trump’s tactics have impacted markets beyond just S&P levels or the 10 year treasury. Apollo published clear data showing how certain correlations have been disrupted. In particular the US dollar has lost about 10% of its value, possibly attributable…

Warren Buffett hosted his final Berkshire Hathaway meeting as CEO this past weekend. Here are some thoughts and takeaways from listening to the 94 year old Oracle of Omaha. Currencies “That’s the big thing we worry about with the United States currency. The tendency of a government to want to debase its currency over time – there’s no system that…

Private v Public Debate Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine published a great commentary this week on the ongoing public vs private market tension. The punchline is, “And if an increasing share of the economy — and particularly of the fastest-growing and most valuable firms — is in private assets, investors can’t just index. You can’t get “the market return” by buying…