The employment report released last Friday offered contradictory views of the state of the economy. The Current Employment Survey (also called the payroll or establishment survey), which comes from a survey of 119,000 businesses, showed a gain of 272,000 jobs for the month of May, which is right in line with the monthly average since April of 2022. On the [...]
I don't write or talk much about trade but it is, obviously, an important part of the global economy. With all the talk of deglobalization, you'd think that the US trade deficit must be shrinking, right? And with all those tariffs, imports must be falling right? Well, okay but the US doesn't make anything anymore and our trade policies have [...]
"The uncertainty about where neutral is today creates a challenge for policymakers." - Neel Kashkari, Minneapolis Federal Reserve President Last week was a volatile one for markets with big swings in stocks and bonds in a holiday-shortened week. The economic data didn't appear to be sufficiently out of the expected range to justify big moves but we got them anyway. [...]
A recent poll conducted by Harris and the UK news outlet The Guardian, produced some interesting results. Of those polled: 56% believe the US economy is in recession 49% believe the S&P 500 is down for the year 49% believe the unemployment rate is at a 50-year high 72% think inflation is increasing The reporting on this has been mostly [...]
Until a few years ago, non-traded REITs were, along with some other sketchy investments, the red-headed step child of the investment world. Nobody liked them except the people selling them who got paid big commissions to do so. They were often riddled with fraud and insider dealing and have been a consistent source of complaints to FINRA and the SEC. [...]
Bonds and stocks rallied last week on the back of two pretty good inflation reports, right? I suppose but there were other things going on too so let's take a look at how inflation expectations changed last week and see if that's what drove markets. The 5 year inflation breakeven fell by 2 basis points. Yes, 2. 10 year inflation [...]
There were two important inflation reports last week. One of them, the Producer Price Index, focuses on wholesale prices and it showed inflation hotter than expected in April. The year-over-year change bottomed in June of last year at just 0.3% and has been rising steadily since then. It now stands at 2.2%. The market reaction to this report was - [...]
Special Note: Back in late March, I highlighted a charitable organization - Our Grounds - that I had had a very positive interaction with and asked that you consider donating. I also asked readers to send me recommendations for other charities they supported and today I am pleased to feature Sugar Plum Bakery in Virginia Beach, VA, recommended by Alhambra [...]
Coming into last week's FOMC meeting, Jerome Powell was expected to be hawkish. I know that because numerous articles in the financial press told me so which makes me wonder if the articles themselves affected those expectations. Maybe. Bloomberg is now producing a Fed Sentiment index that is powered by a natural language processing algorithm trained on more than 60,000 [...]
Be careful what you wish for lest it come true! - Various of Aesop's Fables Shinzo Abe was elected to a second term as Japanese Prime Minister in 2012 and launched his three arrows plan to revive the Japanese economy. The three arrows were: Ultra loose monetary policy, a de facto policy to weaken the Yen Fiscal policy - increased [...]
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