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March Madness!

After brief hiatus due to around the world tour (first time in southern hemisphere), it's good to be back home. And of course it's March Madness season. It's futile to even come up with perfect bracket since even most advanced AI with all the data crunching in the world will not be able to predict perfect bracket even in 22nd century. Looks like after 40 games, there are two perfect brackets remaining (out of tens of millions) as of this writing. So let's pick only top 4 teams. Here are my picks:

  • Virginia Cavaliers
  • Kentucky Wildcats
  • Duke Blue Devils
  • Gonzaga Bulldogs
Any one of these could win the championship. While college basketball march madness is in full swing, there are other events in the world which match the "madness" aspects! Let's look at them

Brexit "May"hem:
This is truly a "Shaskperean" class drama unfolding in Britain. At this time, no one knows what British people and politicians want. Accordingly to rules, Mar 29 was supposed to be the key date when Brexit would have been effective with or without deal. After multiple failed votes in parliament, May keeps on going to EU to get additional concessions or extended timelines. Now she got two dates - one in Apr and one in May. So depending on how British MPs vote, world will know what happens to Brexit. Given the size of British economy and in general EU's state of economy, maybe world does not care what happens. May should just have another referendum and let people decide once for all. I guess British would decide to stay in EU if there is another referendum (provided there are no "external" forces influencing the elections)

Muller Report:
After almost 2 years, Muller has wrapped up his special investigations of Russian meddling into US presidential elections and submitted his report to AG. Muller has done an outstanding job in running the investigations professionally and without any public statements. So while both parties will try to politicize the findings, people would trust what's in the report and make their own conclusions. So what happens next? AG would have to make the report public at some point of time and then congress and people have to decide in upcoming elections what to do with President Trump and congress.

Fed Interest Rates and Markets:
Just few months back, everyone was predicting 3 or more interest rate hikes by US Federal Reserve Bank. And based on last week's Fed meeting and direction of 10 year yields, interest rate cuts may be on horizon. What happened? One word - Recession! Last week, yield inversion happened - means interest rates on 10 year treasuries is less than 3-month treasuries. And since 1975, every time it happened, recession followed up in next 18 months. So I won't be surprised if we have recession (even shallow one) in 2020. Given markets normally react to potential direction of economy 6-12 months in advance, market swoon last week was expected. Now Fed can always come to rescue by actually reducing interest rates by end of 2019 and delay the recession by few quarters. 

US-China Trade Talks:
These talks are entering into 6 or 7th innings with back-n-forth talks in Washington and Beijing. Most likely we will see Trump and Xi meeting and wrapping up the deal in late Apr or May. 

So lots of "madness" in the world. Outside of this madness: India elections are announced, IPL cricket season has started, US college admission results started coming in. More on these topics later!

/Shyam



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