On this site you will find five special link pages on the exogenous forces that move capital markets — forces I call the ‘Five Horsemen of the Investment Apocalypse’ :

Here are some links on five great forces that move markets

• War

• New Leaders

• Demographics

• New Technology

• New Economic Theory

These link collections are intended to help analysts keep up to date on these topics.

Updated comments and observations on these exogenous forces are archived in Capital Flow Watch in the respective categories.

I developed the methods of Capital Flow Analysis over the six years 1998-2004, based on experience in capital markets.

I received a degree in economics from Cornell University in 1954, but Federal Reserve flow of funds accounts (first published in 1952) were never mentioned by my professors, and, because I was working abroad after 1956, I was unaware that the Federal Reserve began quarterly publications of these accounts in 1965.

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Capital Flow Analysis is a sub-technique in the general field of flow of funds analysis. John Dawson, the leading expert on flow of funds analysis, said that “Flow of funds analysis is an undefined and partially hidden field of study”.

(See: “Flow of Funds Analysis: A Handbook for Practitioners“)

The flow of funds accounts themselves were developed in the 1940s and 1950s by Morris Copeland, an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank and were later expanded and polished by Stephen Taylor, the Chief of Flow-of-Funds of the Federal Reserve.

At that time, the compilation of flow of funds statistics was a branch of “social accounting”, which itself was a major sub-field of economic statistics. The initial technique followed guidelines of financial statements and therefore was oriented towards financial markets and people of the real world rather than theoretical economists.

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