LukeGromenErik Townsend welcomes Luke Gromen to MacroVoices. Erik and Luke discuss:

  • Why be bearish on the US Dollar?
  • Do budget deficits matter?
  • New yuan oil contract changing global landscape
  • Impact on global Eurodollar system
  • Long gold, short oil
  • What is wrong with a new QE?
  • Impact on global holding of Treasury Bonds
  • Is inflation in the US a risk?
  • Is the economic endgame starting?

We strongly recommend that you download the chart book that accompanies this interview as Erik and Luke will refer to it throughout the interview. Registered users here at MacroVoices.com already received the download link in your research roundup e-mail. If you haven’t already registered, click the red “Subscribe for FREE” button on the top right side of the home page, and register.  Once logged in, click “Research Library” and Guest Publications near the top of the page. From there you can download the PDF.

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Luke Gromen began his career in the mid-1990s in the Research Department at Midwest Research before moving over to institutional equity sales and becoming a partner. While in sales, Luke was a founding editor of Midwest’s widely-read weekly summary (“Heard in the Midwest”) for the firm’s clients, in which he aggregated and combined proprietary research from Midwest with inputs from other sources.

In 2006, Luke left FTN Midwest to become a founding partner of Cleveland Research Company. At CRC, Luke continued to work in sales and edit CRC’s flagship weekly research summary piece (“Straight from the Source”) for the firm’s customers.

In 2014, Luke left Cleveland Research to found FFTT, LLC (“Forest for the Trees”), a macro/thematic research firm catering to institutions and high net worth individuals that aggregates a wide variety of macroeconomic, thematic and sector trends in an unconventional manner to identify investable developing economic bottlenecks for our customers, as we have found that excess investment returns tend to accrue to economic bottlenecks over time.

Our vision for FFTT was to create a firm that would address the opportunity we saw created by applying what customers and former colleagues consistently described as our “unique ability to put the big picture pieces together” during a time when we saw an increasing “silo-ing” of perspectives occurring on Wall Street and in corporate America.

Luke Gromen is a graduate of the University of Cincinnati and received his MBA from Case Western Reserve University. He earned the CFA designation in 2003.