The Fed meets this week and is widely expected to say that it is talking about maybe reducing bond purchases sometime later this year or maybe next year or at least, someday. Jerome Powell will hold a press conference at which he'll tell us that markets have nothing to worry about because even if they taper QE, interest rates aren't [...]
The wise man is one who knows what he does not know. - Lao Tzu or Socrates or neither It ain't what you don't know that gets you in trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so. - Mark Twain or Josh Billings or Artemus Ward or none of the above Stocks are at all-time [...]
The economic slowdown we've been writing about for months officially arrived last Friday in the form of a particularly weak employment report. The number of new jobs created last month - or at least the WAG the BLS makes at such things on a monthly basis - was a mere 235,000 or roughly a cool half-million less than expected by [...]
Jerome Powell delivered his long-anticipated speech at Jackson Hole last week. Well actually, I have no idea if he was actually in Jackson Hole since the speech was delivered electronically, another victim of the delta variant. The virus itself rated barely a mention in Mr. Powell's remarks and I think that is probably as it should be. There has been [...]
This week marks a change in our economic environment or at least our perception of it. Last year, post-COVID onset, we characterized the environment as one marked by a falling dollar and improving growth. To be exact, that is the environment the markets reflected; interest rates were rising, the yield curve was steepening and the dollar was falling. That changed [...]
Today is the 50th anniversary of the "Nixon shock", the day President Richard Nixon closed the gold window and ended the post-WWII Bretton Woods currency agreement. That agreement, largely a product of John Maynard Keynes, pegged the dollar to gold and most other currencies to the dollar. It wasn't a true gold standard as only other countries that were party [...]
Remember "The New Normal"? Back in 2009, Bill Gross, the old bond king before Gundlach came along, penned a market commentary called "On the Course to a New Normal" which he said would be: "a period of time in which economies grow very slowly as opposed to growing like weeds, the way children do; in which profits are relatively static; [...]
They're out there panicking right now. I can feel it. They're out there. They're panicking. Look at them. - Eddie Murphy as Billy Ray Valentine in Trading Places I thought of that scene the other day when a good friend in the investment business told me that investors today are panicking into the market rather than out as they were [...]
If you were waiting for a correction in stock prices to put some money to work, you got your chance last week. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down nearly 1000 points at the low Monday and closed down 725, a loss of a little over 2%. The S&P 500 did a little better but closed down 1.5%. It looked [...]
Is there anyone left out there who doesn't know the rate of economic growth is slowing? The 10-year Treasury yield has fallen 45 basis points since peaking in mid-March. 10-year TIPS yields have fallen by the same amount and now reside below -1% again. Copper prices peaked a little later (early May), fell 16% at the recent low, and are [...]
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