Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy

Weekly Market Pulse: The Fed’s Conundrum

By |2024-06-03T07:22:46-04:00June 3rd, 2024|Alhambra Portfolios, Alhambra Research, Bonds, Commodities, Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets, Newsletter, Real Estate, Stocks|

"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. [...]

Weekly Market Pulse: Ch-Ch-Changes

By |2024-05-20T07:40:57-04:00May 19th, 2024|Alhambra Portfolios, Alhambra Research, Bonds, Commodities, Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets, Newsletter, Real Estate, Stocks|

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 - [...]

Weekly Market Pulse: Question Time

By |2024-05-13T07:31:49-04:00May 12th, 2024|Alhambra Portfolios, Alhambra Research, Bonds, Commodities, Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets, Newsletter, Real Estate, Stocks|

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 [...]

Weekly Market Pulse: What Did He Say?

By |2024-05-06T07:26:56-04:00May 5th, 2024|Alhambra Portfolios, Alhambra Research, Bonds, Commodities, Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets, Newsletter, Real Estate, Stocks|

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 [...]

Weekly Market Pulse: Situation Normal

By |2024-04-22T07:37:32-04:00April 21st, 2024|Alhambra Portfolios, Alhambra Research, Bonds, Commodities, Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets, Newsletter, Real Estate, Stocks|

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 [...]

Weekly Market Pulse: Are Higher Interest Rates Good For The Economy?

By |2024-04-15T07:38:25-04:00April 15th, 2024|Alhambra Portfolios, Alhambra Research, Bonds, Commodities, Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets, Newsletter, Real Estate, Stocks, Taxes/Fiscal Policy|

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 [...]

Weekly Market Pulse: Don’t Just Do Something, Sit There

By |2024-04-01T07:39:20-04:00March 31st, 2024|Alhambra Portfolios, Alhambra Research, Bonds, Commodities, Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets, Newsletter, Real Estate, Stocks|

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, [...]

Weekly Market Pulse: Rational Exuberance?

By |2024-03-25T05:41:54-04:00March 24th, 2024|Alhambra Portfolios, Alhambra Research, Bonds, Commodities, Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets, Newsletter, Real Estate, Stocks|

Special Note: I'm in Miami this week, a mix of business and personal. I lived here for 30 years and we raised our family here but we moved to South Carolina a little over 3 years ago because we were tired of the traffic and, more than that, the irritability that comes with so many people crammed into such a [...]

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