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My sense from having recently spoken to a sample of U.S. box industry participants is that demand/volume trends didn’t get noticeably worse in March despite the dramatic rise in gasoline and diesel prices and its…

I wrote in recent days (link) about record-high financial leverage, with large banks and their affiliated broker-dealers lending an enormous amount of money to hedge funds via repo to finance asset price speculation including the…

There’s been a great deal of attention on the private credit and business development company (BDC) industry of late for all the wrong reasons, among them rising withdrawal requests, capped withdrawals, falling net asset values,…

I published a note last week on bank-enabled financial leverage, which is at record highs in many cases and which has been growing by the month even as the Federal Reserve noted in its most…

I recently hosted a call with several privately held U.S. boxmakers, whose perspective often differs from that of the publicly traded containerboard producers. Among the topics discussed were (1) the impact or lack thereof of…

To my longtime readers, I’m back publishing on banking and consumer spending, as well as on paper & packaging. This note is on banking; the other topics will follow. Briefly regarding consumer spending, the BEA’s…