Team Van Hoisington has essentially walked into their office every day since 1982 and said, “Buy More 30 Year Treasuries.”

That has arguably been the longest duration successful trade in history, other than “Long US, short Argentina” since the Cubs have won a World Series and the Cincinnati Bengals are improbably riding a “so what sack me 9 times” offensive strategy into the AFC championships.

A plausible narrative should always be, but often isn’t, checked against some data. There is data here, though arguably it slants, “This is what happened to Japan.” As of this writing, team VH remains unrepentant — too much debt and too much dumb government policy mean interest rates are going to stay low and for longer. Very much worth reading and pondering.

Read the piece here.

This happens to be a paragraph we particularly love and will subtly plagiarize in future writing.

In theoretical discussions in introductory and intermediate economic texts, economic relationships are explained under what is known as the ceteris paribus condition, where only one variable is moving while all others are being held constant. An economy has many moving parts however and is more precisely described by the phrase mutatis mutandis which means that all the variables are moving at the same time.