"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 [...]
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 [...]
Is this normal? I haven't made any money in like two years. - Question from a recent acquaintance upon hearing what I do for a living Let's get this out of the way quickly. The answer to his question is yes, this is painfully normal. When you have a bear market - or you have two in four years like [...]
Interest rates surged last week on the back of a hotter-than-expected inflation report that wasn't actually that bad (see below). Not that my - or your - opinion about these things matters all that much to the market. In the short run, all that matters is what the majority believes is the truth. What they believed last week was that [...]
Markets year to date have been a lot more interesting in the details than the headlines you get in the financial media. The narrative has focused almost exclusively on Artificial Intelligence and the stocks benefitting from it. Large cap growth stocks - especially in the IT and Communications sectors - have garnered all the attention. But beneath the surface markets [...]
The first quarter of 2024 is in the books and the US economy and markets continue to defy expectations, which coming into this year were that growth and inflation would both moderate and the Fed would be able (or forced, depending on how much things slowed) to cut interest rates 0.25% as many as six times this year. In fact, [...]
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