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 - [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Nvidia reported earnings last week and they were, to be sober about it, incredible. Total revenue rose to $22.1 billion for the quarter, up 22% from last quarter and 265% year-over-year. Data center revenue, which is what investors really ought to be watching with this company, was up 27% from last quarter and a whopping 409% year-over-year. Gross margins run [...]
I'm back! I took most of the month of December off, as I do every year, to do some thinking. Per the title of this essay, the purpose of these year-end musings is to gain some perspective. In the day-to-day, week-to-week, movements of the markets it is easy to forget that we are investing with a timeline measured in years, [...]
Note: This will be my last commentary this year. I plan to spend December thinking about next year and spending some much-needed time with family. Here's wishing you all a Happy Holiday season. Joe Calhoun Two years ago, I wrote a weekly commentary titled Who's The Sucker, in which I made the case that the S&P 500 was not a [...]
We have a lot to be thankful for here in the US of A. It is sometimes hard to remember that while being constantly bombarded by negative news, about the economy and the country more generally. I don't like to comment about politics - I have to watch my blood pressure these days - so I'll stick to economics and [...]
It's the residual of all the stuff we can't explain. It's not that our models are wrong, it's the dark matter that's out there. - Fed Governor Neel Kashkari, referring to the "term premium" in long term Treasury yields The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can [...]
There were some very smart people a year ago saying that you couldn't kill inflation without a big rise in unemployment. Last October, Larry Summers - former Treasury Secretary and President of Harvard - said we'd need a recession and an unemployment rate of 6% to kill inflation. In the summer of last year, he said we'd need 5 years [...]
Why aren't we in recession yet? That's a question that has been asked often over the last year but with no real satisfying answer. I have my own beliefs on the subject, rooted in the distortions of COVID. (You can read about it in my latest Follow The Money piece) I think my explanation is a pretty good one but even [...]
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