In January 2022, we ventured three hundred years back in time to an episode that has long been considered the classic example of mania in the early annals of market history.

When inflation begins to upend financial markets, as it has over the past few years, it represents a tremendous disruption.

One and three hundred years before the enormity of the present dilemma began to dawn on the Federal Reserve, a similar moment arrived within the stone walls of the Banque Royale. You may recall the scene we visited last year.

For the years following the Lehman crisis, the Fed put was the norm. Exceptionally loose monetary policy ensured risk assets had a safety net. But central banks were unable to rehabilitate the real economy while governments kept their belts tight.

For those of us with an inclination toward understanding current events through the lens of history, periods of irrational exuberance represent a special challenge.

After a decade of decadence in which the base money supply was multiplied more than seven-fold in an effort to prevent deflation, broader measures of money supply and consumer prices may have only just begun catching up.

This is part 1 of Volume I Issue VI of the Macro Value Monitor, a publication focusing on Monetary History, Market Myths, Investing Legends, and Real Global Value.

If we follow the threads underlying inflation over the past year to their earliest beginnings, they run straight through the fog of pandemic, quickly pass by the financial crisis in 2008, and wind their way past the Great Inflation of the 1970s...

The story of the Banque Royale and the Mississippi Bubble in the first issue of the Macro Value Monitor may sound like a tall tale of financial fiction, but those events did in fact occur three centuries ago in France.

As much as last year centered around the Covid-19 pandemic and its impact on the economy, the major topic of discussion in the financial markets this year has been centered around inflation, and its prospective impact on monetary policy.

One theme we have focused on in these letters over the past three years is what a transition into a regime of negative real interest rates looks and feels like, and the long-term consequences such a regime brings for the markets, and for investors.

It often happens that associations which end up leaving an indelible mark on our collective memory of certain market events are the result of sheer happenstance

The Great Inflation of the 1960s and 70s, the earliest stages of which were already underway when Graham spoke at the St. Francis Hotel, eventually produced some of the most astonishing economic dislocations in U.S. history.