Michael Ashton - Harvest

Michael Ashton

Affiliation

Enduring Investments LLC

Managing Principal of Enduring Investments

Title

CEO

Certifications

Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA)

Education

Trinity University

Company Name
Enduring Investments LLC

Company Description
Providing innovative and effective inflation solutions

Search Posts...

Michael Ashton, Enduring Investments LLC

Inflation Guy’s CPI Summary (August 2025)

Before I begin talking about today’s CPI, a quick word about the 24 th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of 9/11. As someone who worked 1 block from the Towers, I can tell you it’s a day I will never forget and filled with images I can never ...

Sep 11, 2025

Michael Ashton, Enduring Investments LLC

The Fate of FAIT was Fated

Growth in the US is ebbing, and it is likely only the AI boom that is keeping us from recording a small recession. Unemployment is still rising, although slowly, and credit delinquencies are rising. Because the services sector and the goods sector ...

Sep 02, 2025

Michael Ashton, Enduring Investments LLC

How to Calculate USDi’s Current Value

I haven’t been writing a lot during August, nor have I done many podcast episodes. I feel like I make this apology almost every year, but it seems every year August just gets slower, and slower, and slower – and any content I push out gets less ...

Aug 28, 2025

Michael Ashton, Enduring Investments LLC

Inflation Guy’s CPI Summary (July 2025)

The inflation story and the employment story are about the only things rippling the still summer waters these days, it seems. The weak employment data in the most-recent report got equity investors very excited since every analyst worth his or her ...

Aug 12, 2025

Michael Ashton, Enduring Investments LLC

An Update/Reminder on Rent Inflation

A subscriber to our Quarterly Inflation Outlook (you can subscribe here ) wrote to me recently and asked about a research piece put out by a major sell-side investment house that discussed how private rental indices (such as Zillow) and the Fed’s ...

Jul 24, 2025

Michael Ashton, Enduring Investments LLC

USELESS Coin vs Very Useful Coin

It is rare, in the investment world, for an investment to honestly and fully disclaim its basic nature in a way that finishes the story and requires no further analysis from us before making an investment decision. I have found such an investment. It ...

Jul 18, 2025

Michael Ashton, Enduring Investments LLC

Inflation Guy’s CPI Summary (June 2025)

If you squint, can you see an effect of the deportations of illegal aliens in today’s CPI report? I don’t want to encourage anyone to obsess over every jot and tittle of the report. That’s almost always a fraught exercise. But there were at least a ...

Jul 15, 2025

Michael Ashton, Enduring Investments LLC

When and How Much Tariff Effect?

As we look forward to the CPI report next week, the monthly-repeating theme is ‘when will the tariff effect show up?’ The answer, so far, is ‘not yet,’ but economists who had forecasted the end of life as we know it when the Trump tariffs went into ...

Jul 09, 2025

Michael Ashton, Enduring Investments LLC

The Twin Deficits – One Out of Two IS Bad

From time to time on this blog, I circle back to the question of the balance of deficits. In my mind, as our economy goes through whatever the “Trump Transition” is, the biggest risk to the bond markets is not from some fear about whether the ...

Jun 25, 2025

Michael Ashton, Enduring Investments LLC

The Road to Crypto Conversion

While this isn’t exactly the conversion of Saul on the road to Damascus, I came to a realization recently that subtly changes the way I look at the potential for large cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin. Historically, my attitude has been dismissive ...

Jun 17, 2025

Michael Ashton, Enduring Investments LLC

Inflation Guy’s CPI Summary (May 2025)

Well, this was an odd one to sort out. Going into the CPI announcement this morning, the economist consensus was for +0.17% (seasonally adjusted) on headline CPI m/m and +0.28% on core. Market changes this month have been very contained, partly ...

Jun 11, 2025

Michael Ashton, Enduring Investments LLC

Why a 4.5% Nominal Rate is Roughly Equilibrium…Hmmm, Sounds Familiar…

I was planning to write today about why a 4.5%-5.0% nominal Treasury rate is not only not the end of the world, but actually sort of normal. Naturally, the reason I am even thinking about the topic is because of all of the apparent alarm because the ...

May 28, 2025

Michael Ashton, Enduring Investments LLC

Inflation Guy’s CPI Summary (April 2025)

Before the CPI analysis, I always try to give some context for where we are in the ‘story’ about the evolution of inflation right now. It’s really difficult to do that, though, because of all of the massive policy changes that are happening – and ...

May 13, 2025

Michael Ashton, Enduring Investments LLC

Inflation After 100 Days

It is hard to believe that a third of the year is already past. Some people, of course, would say that it seems like a hundred years have passed in the first hundred days of Trump’s second term, but to me it seems like a blink. Here’s a quick mark- ...

May 01, 2025

Michael Ashton, Enduring Investments LLC

Announcing USDi…Inflation-Linked Cash

As many of you know, one of my goals in life – for decades – has been to expand the inflation-linked investing ecosystem to other structures (e.g. options), other legs of the liquidity triad (e.g. cash, swaps, futures), other more-specific inflation ...

Apr 15, 2025

Michael Ashton, Enduring Investments LLC

Inflation Guy’s CPI Summary (March 2025)

Before we get started on today’s CPI, let me add a few wise words from an old market observer: The stock market is not the economy. The stock market is the (private real economy) times (price per unit of the private real economy). When the stock ...

Apr 10, 2025

Michael Ashton, Enduring Investments LLC

The Coming Surge in College Tuition Inflation

Today’s news is clearly about the imposition of new reciprocal tariffs on US trading partners, and the responses that those countries will have to the tariffs. In terms of the markets’ reactions, it does seem shocking to me that people were shocked ...

Apr 03, 2025

Michael Ashton, Enduring Investments LLC

Inflation Guy’s CPI Summary (February 2025)

Look, I know that traders sometimes think their job is to overreact. And media folks benefit from overreacting. And political strategists have been genetically bred to overreacting. But a bit of rational analysis here is probably worthwhile. The ...

Mar 12, 2025

Michael Ashton, Enduring Investments LLC

Gold Prices Are Getting Frothy

Behold, my roughly-annual blog post on gold. I recognize that there is a good case for gold at a time when the price level is rising steadily and there are upside risks to inflation and downside risks to the dollar. Let me start there. I get a little ...

Mar 06, 2025

Michael Ashton, Enduring Investments LLC

Illustrating the Cost of Leverage Effect on Returns

A couple of weeks ago, I presented a blog post called “ The Effect of Crazy Time on Portfolio Allocations ,” in which I pointed out that the effect of increasing volatility generally is to decrease the optimal portfolio allocations towards safer ...

Feb 24, 2025

Michael Ashton, Enduring Investments LLC

Growth. Does. Not. Cause. Inflation.

I am constantly amazed at certain articles of faith among the economics community. In my line of expertise, one of the most amazing to me is the absolute conviction with which the economics community believes that if the economy grows too fast, ...

Feb 18, 2025

Michael Ashton, Enduring Investments LLC

Inflation Guy’s CPI Summary (January 2025)

We finished 2024 with a slightly soft reading, but we began 2025 with a hot reading. Now, my admonition last month about the volatility of December data applies also to January data, although less so in CPI than in some other indicators. However, ...

Feb 12, 2025

Michael Ashton, Enduring Investments LLC

The Effect of Crazy Time on Portfolio Allocations

I am continually fascinated by how many second-order ‘understandings’ are missed, even by those people who have a really good first-order understanding of finance. For example, every financial advisor understands that bonds are less volatile than ...

Feb 05, 2025

Michael Ashton, Enduring Investments LLC

Trump Tactical Targeted Tariffs: A Reminder of the Impact of Tariffs

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, aka AOC, recently railed against the President when he threatened Colombia with tariffs if they should refuse to accept their citizens being deported back to them. In her typical hyperventilated fashion, she ...

Jan 29, 2025

Michael Ashton, Enduring Investments LLC

Framing Home Price Inflation

The ever-increasing cost of homes obviously causes a lot of people a lot of angst. Chief among those groups, naturally, are the people who are planning to buy a home but do not yet have one; and, since higher home prices are very highly correlated ...

Jan 22, 2025

5-YEAR EXPECTED RETURNS

The Stale Renaissance

We’re in both an age of enlightenment and an age of turmoil. The progression embodied in artificial intelligence is being met with the regression of incoherent and threatening policies from the US. That’s why we’ve called this year’s edition of Expected Returns ‘The Stale Renaissance’ to reflect this paradox.

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