We will all have high highs and big days and proud moments of smiles on graduation stages, father daughter dances at weddings and healthy babies screeching in the delivery room, but between those high highs, we may also have some lumps and some bumps too.

There s no peak, only higher. The share price of Kweichow Moutai has continued to set new highs unabated.

It sounds bizarre because I did okay, made a reasonable living out of it, and enjoyed some reasonable highs.

But when the scarcity came when the highs and lows and the droughts came, then people went into starvation.

AV Yeah, and then you have your first child, and then you really resubmit yourself to these highs and lows the highs being the first steps, the first smile, your child reading to you for the first time the lows being, our house, any time from six to seven every night.

Interestingly, the market share of heroin and cocaine is going down, because the pills are getting ever better at reproducing their highs.

(2) Where a securities firm offers investment suggestions to its client, making certainty judgment on highs and lows of security prices or market trends

Global stock markets have, overall, reached new highs. And credit markets show low spreads, while long term bond yields have fallen in most advanced economies.

Greece is in its fifth year of a slump. And eurozone unemployment is at record highs, with nearly one in two young people jobless in Spain and Greece.

Tensions in financial markets have hit new highs. Most telling is that Britain, which retained control of its currency, enjoys the lowest yields in its history, while the risk premium on Spanish bonds is at a new high.

Since the end of the Cold War, there have been fewer civil wars, fewer genocides indeed, a 90 percent reduction since post World War II highs and even a reversal of the 1960s uptick in homicide and violent crime.

First, joblessness continues to spread. The overall unemployment rate (12 ) has yet to peak, led by an alarming lack of jobs among the young (24 joblessness in the eurozone as a whole, with highs of 59 and 56 in Greece and Spain, respectively).

With fears mounting that one or another euro zone country may default, yield spreads on government bonds between EMU countries have reached record highs. For some time now, Greek ten year government bond yields have been about 300 basis points above German yields.

When you go through so much at such a young age he went to his first Olympics aged 14 and his father died of cancer three years later he said that it was hard to find someone the same age who had experienced similar highs and lows.

CAMBRIDGE How should one understand the disconnect between the new highs reached by global equity indices and the new depths plumbed by real interest rates worldwide? Several competing explanations attempt to reconcile these trends, and getting it right is essential for calibrating monetary and fiscal policy appropriately.

Corporations have benefited massively from these stimulus measures, but at the expense of the working population. Profit margins have expanded to record highs as companies have cut costs, delayed infrastructure investments, borrowed at ultra low rates, and taken advantage of weak labor markets to avoid raising wages.

But, whereas metal prices have fallen, oil prices are reaching record highs. The reason is simple metal usage has been substituted by many alternatives, but most still require petroleum products as inputs, and decades long efforts to develop sufficient alternative energy sources have yielded little success.

It seems that this thinking is heavily influenced by recent record highs in stock markets, even if these levels are practically meaningless, given inflation. Notably, just a month ago the Morgan Stanley Capital International All Country World Index broke the record that it reached on October 31, 2007.

Oil prices have surged to more than 100 per barrel, as China, India, and other oil importing countries join the United States in a massive scramble to buy up supplies, especially from the Middle East. Food prices, too, are at historical highs, contributing to poverty and political unrest.

SEOUL The commodity super cycle in which commodity prices reach ever higher highs, and fall only to higher lows is not over. Despite the euphoria around shale gas indeed, despite weak global growth commodity prices have risen by as much as 150 in the aftermath of the financial crisis.

These are perhaps the only two certainties in Mexico s politics right now. With oil prices higher than ever, its country risk premiums lower than ever, remittances from abroad, tourism revenues, and foreign investment hitting all time highs, and annual GDP growth estimated at 4.2 for this year, Mexicans in many ways have never had it so good.

Although the pound has declined by about 10 from its peak of 1.70 last September, sterling weakness has simply reflected the dollar s strength. In the same period, sterling has risen almost 10 against the euro, while British share prices have hit all time highs and government bonds have generated better returns in Britain than in the United States, Germany, or Japan.

The problem is that the Fed s liquidity injections are not creating credit for the real economy, but rather boosting leverage and risk taking in financial markets. The issuance of risky junk bonds under loose covenants and with excessively low interest rates is increasing the stock market is reaching new highs, despite the growth slowdown and money is flowing to high yielding emerging markets.

Meanwhile, acreage used for poppy and marijuana production has risen, according to the US government, to 6,900 and 8,900 hectares, respectively. Restrictions on the transshipment of cocaine from South America to the US have made only a dent in street prices, which spiked in 2008 but have stabilized in 2009 at levels well below their historical highs in the 1990 s.

The irony is that Germany s anxieties about price stability, which underlie the EU s embrace of austerity, are entirely misplaced German inflation could scarcely be lower. With German unemployment, too, hitting record lows, while joblessness hits record highs in Italy and remains at obscene levels in Greece and Spain, what has emerged is a two tier Europe, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel s government calling the shots.

Indeed, with profitability at or near record levels, cash holdings by the corporate sector in the United States have piled up quarter after quarter, reaching all time highs and earning very little at today s near zero interest rates. Moreover, because companies have significantly improved their operating efficiency and lengthened the maturities on their debt, they need a lot less precautionary savings than they did in the past.

NEW YORK Central banks on both sides of the Atlantic took extraordinary monetary policy measures in September the long awaited QE3 (the third dose of quantitative easing by the United States Federal Reserve), and the European Central Bank s announcement that it will purchase unlimited volumes of troubled eurozone members government bonds. Markets responded euphorically, with stock prices in the US, for example, reaching post recession highs.

Household debt stood at 112 of income in the third quarter of 2012 down from record highs in 2006, but still nearly 40 percentage points above the 75 norm of the last three decades of the twentieth century. Similarly, the personal saving rate, at just 3.5 in the four months ending in November 2012, was less than half the 7.9 average of 1970 99.

Irving Fisher s prescient warning in 1933 about such a debt deflation spiral resonates strongly today, given that public and private debt levels are at or near historic highs in many countries. Especially instructive is the 2.2 price decline in Greece for the 12 months ending in July the most severe example of ongoing deflation in the advanced countries and counterproductive to an orderly solution to the country s problems.