|
Please join The CFA Society Portland at the University Club on April 3rd for a luncheon with Mark Higgins, CFA, CFP®.
Investing is a game of repetition, yet most investors fail to see the repetitions because comparable events are often separated by many decades. Therefore, even the most experienced investors often lack the required knowledge to understand current events. The only reliable remedy is to study financial history and manually extend one’s memory of the past.
Mark Higgins, CFA, CFP® will discuss several critical lessons from financial history that remain just as applicable today as they were in the distant past. Many (but not all) of these insights draw from his book, Investing in U.S. Financial History, which will be available online and in bookstores on February 27, 2024. Key topics covered will include:
-
War, Pandemics, and Inflation – This discussion will focus on the lessons from the Post-World War I/Great Influenza of 1919-1920 and how the lack of memory of this event led the Fed to initially conclude that inflation would be “transitory.”
-
Why the Federal Reserve Doves Became Hawks in the Spring of 2022 – The discussion will focus on the lessons from the Great Inflation of 1965-1982. Because this was one of the two greatest errors in the Fed’s 108-year history—the other being the Great Depression—history strongly suggests that the Fed is unlikely to repeat this error.
-
Using History to Filter the Noise – Understanding financial history often proves most valuable by enabling investors to differentiate important news from distracting noise. The failure of Silicon Valley Bank was a great example. Understanding the dynamics (and extreme dangers) of bank runs from studying the frequent bank runs in the 1800s and the early 1930s made it immediately clear that the SVB failure required immediate and decisive action from the Federal Reserve.
| 
