“If, however, one’s risk scenario is of the Thunderdome variant… then there is no better hedge than private, digital money.”
Zero Hedge: For the better part of the past decade, Wall Street traders would end their week with at least a casual glance at JPMorgan’s closely-followed cross-asset report written every week by the bank’s top x-asset strategist, John Normand.
But not any more: as Normand wrote in his May 21 note published last Friday, “this is my last research note and video, as I am moving on after 24 years.” In his note, Normand discusses lessons “learned in over two decades with JPM Research, covering cross-asset strategy/asset allocation, Currencies, Commodities and Fixed Income” a period “which covers four business cycles, three US/global recessions and four financial crises (that didn’t cause US recessions), plus hundreds of weekly reports and client meetings.”
Naturally, no JPMorganite could ever leave off on a bearish note which explains why even as Normand admits it will get ugly soon, he can’t bring himself to tell his clients to sell. One place where can do that, however, is in the asset class that has emerged as JPMorgan’s bogeyman in the past 5 years – cryptos, whose unprecedented eruption higher has made a joke out of Jamie Dimon’s infamous 2017 words when he said that bitcoin is a fraud and the CEO would “fire” any JPMorgan employee caught trading it.
Dumber words have never been spoken by a man as allegedly smart as Dimon, about an asset class that made millionaires and billionaires out of countless people (certainly not JPMorgan employees) who went against everything that Dimon had to say.
So yes, in keeping with JPMorgan’s party line – which is to publicly bash cryptos before the general public while privately accumulating them for its own prop desk – now that JPM traders no longer face termination for doing so especially in light of JPM’s recent expansion into cryptos as the bank launches its own actively managed bitcoin fund (what a change from Dimon’s idiotic 2017 words), Normand – who couldn’t bring himself to tell clients to sell stocks had no such qualms with bitcoin:
“… while I can believe that unrealistic expectations are often build (sic) into single securities, sectors and themes, I am less minded to believe that collective irrationality at the asset-class level is endemic. If I had to avoid any of the very expensive market now it would be Cryptocurrencies, because it entails two characteristics other rich markets lack: a penchant for high investor leverage, and a questionable investment these (sic) about the utility and efficiency of private money compared to legal tender.” Read More
