Special Note On Hurricane Beryl: As thousands of people in coastal Texas remain without power after Hurricane Beryl devastated the region last week, relief groups on the ground are asking for donations to aid their efforts. Here are a few organizations that can put monetary gifts to use right now. - "Where crisis strikes, hunger follows." The U.N. World Food [...]
Any great power that spends more on debt service (interest payments on the national debt) than on defense will not stay great for very long. True of Habsburg Spain, true of ancien régime France, true of the Ottoman Empire, true of the British Empire, this law is about to be put to the test by the U.S. beginning this very year. Historian [...]
The S&P 500 reached a milestone recently. Or at least I think so. The technology sector, as of this week, is now 33.6% of the index. If you count the Communications sector as technology - and you should since 49% of the sector is Meta and Google - the allocation to technology oriented companies is 42.8%. The top 3 companies [...]
"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 [...]
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