It was all over the news last week. Inflation has arrived. The CPI was hotter than expected. The PPI was even hotter. Import prices were up and export prices were up more. It was impossible to miss the inflation story last week. Stocks got the message and sold off on the hot CPI and finished the week lower for a [...]
We have reached the point of absurdity in the crypto markets. There were people buying Dogecoin last week in anticipation of Elon Musk's appearance on Saturday Night Live, with the expectation, presumably, that he would say something bullish and they'd be able to ring the cash register. Easy, peasy, cha-ching. Except, well, at last check it didn't work out that [...]
Huge miss. Whopping dud. Maybe it wasn’t nearly that bad?The consensus forecast had called for payroll growth in April 2021 of something like +980,000, in line with the previous blowout estimate for March. In the updated batch, first that prior one was revised downward to just +770,000 and then the latest guess put the current month at a seemingly awful [...]
Last week I was contacted by two clients seeking information about cryptocurrencies. One was my godson, 12 years old and just getting started in investing. So far, he's bought Nintendo and Roblox (the latter against my recommendation but what do I know about video games?). But last week he said he wants to buy a cryptocurrency. He first mentioned Dogecoin [...]
The answer to the question, "What should I do to my portfolio today (this week, this month)? is almost always nothing. Humans, and especially portfolio managers, have a hard time believing that doing nothing is the right response....to anything...or nothing. We are programmed to believe that success comes from doing things, not not doing things. And so, often we look [...]
I've been getting that question a lot these days. How high can rates go? It is asked in a way that seems to imply that the answer is obvious - not much. Why? The answer is almost always the same; the Fed can't and won't let rates go up. If they did, it would kill the economy and raise the [...]
At first glance, the numbers weren’t bad. Maybe even borderline OK. The headline payroll figure nearly doubled consensus estimates, even better when taking into account only private payrolls even after ADP earlier this week had reported the opposite. Topline, the Establishment Survey gained 379,000 in February 2021, of which 465,000 were reportedly added to the private economy (government employment shrank [...]
The ISM reported its manufacturing index at highs on Monday, then today releases its non-manufacturing headline falling sharply. The result is an odd appendage to post-2008 history where these sentiment indicators are concerned; they are upside down to the usual configuration when it’s been more likely manufacturing suffers while services are to a greater extent immune to each successive suppressing [...]
Last week was only four days due to the President's day holiday but it was eventful. The big news of the week was the spike in interest rates, which according to the press reports I read, "came out of nowhere". In other words, the writers couldn't find an obvious cause for a 14-basis point rise in the 10-year Treasury note [...]
American consumers were back in action in January 2021. The “unemployment cliff” along with the slowdown and contraction in the labor market during the last quarter of 2020 had left retail sales falling backward with employment. Seasonally-adjusted, total retail spending had declined for three straight months to end last year.The latest updated estimates from the Census Bureau, released today, show [...]
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