Webinars

Pro Call replay for Perscient Pro members.

Pro Call replay for Perscient Pro members.

Webinar replay for Perscient Pro members.

An update to Ben's original Shadow Banking Webinar. One year later, how has the story shifted?

We’ve built and published a new set of narrative storyboards on traditional safe haven assets like US Treasuries, and we discuss that in this live Zoom call with ET Pro members, along with some additional narrative datapoints on fiscal policy.

A recording of our Professional Call held on Friday April 24, 2025.

Our technology shows two narratives -- “Foreign Investors Repatriating Capital” and “Investors see Gold as Better Alternative to UST” -- exploding in financial media density over the past eight weeks. We're not far from a fundamental shift in market common knowledge regarding US home bias and USD bias, with potential tectonic shifts in longstanding asset correlations and allocation models. In this webinar we'll discuss a model portfolio to respond to this profound shift in power, narrative and behavior.

For the past year, I've been working through an analytic framework to understand the catalysts of the next financial crisis, one that has its epicenter in what we used to call 'shadow banking' (asset managers engaged in private equity and private credit) rather than the usual epicenter of commercial banking. We'll be sharing that framework - marrying our narrative tracking technology with business cycle, interest rate, and geopolitical dynamics - along with its portfolio allocation implications in this webinar.

My long vol / tail risk scenarios for 2025:

1) A US election that will be close – very close in the electoral college – where both the winning side and the losing side will claim that the other guy cheated, and the winning side will unleash a tsunami of spending and tax cuts to buy political support.

2) A Phony War between Israel and Iran where both sides are actively planning an existential conflict, temporarily dormant today in the same way that the war between Germany and France was temporarily dormant in 1939 after Hitler invaded Poland.

3) A preventive war to come between China and the US, initiated over access to advanced technology and catalyzed by a technology embargo in the same way that the preventive war between Japan and the US in 1941 was initiated over access to oil and catalyzed by an oil embargo.

4) A new Great Financial Crisis stemming from the overleverage, regulatory arbitrage, self-dealing, balance sheet shenanigans, malinvestment, financialization and profound derivative basis risk that permeates the modern insurance/reinsurance sector.

A replay of the July 2021 Epsilon Theory webinar covering our latest narrative research and the release of our new ET Pro Monitors: the Consolidated Directional Equity Dashboard and the Consolidated Equity Trend Dashboard.