Barbarians at the Fed

This week we are going to visit my Worry Closet, where things goes bump in the night. There are many writers who assure us that those sounds are imaginary and I should go back to sleep. But others suggest the sounds may emanate from some real substance, and that their corpus is growing in the dark. We will review the arguments while we take a quick peep into the closet.

But first, a few comments about last week's letter. I was writing about bond ladders and fixed income investments. Many of you rightly noted that I did not mention foreign currencies or other alternatives to government bonds.

First, I was trying to talk about building structured bond portfolios and not about what should actually go in them. The letter was getting long as it was. But I should have noted that I…