Anne Doremus

Americans have long struggled to save enough for retirement, and unfortunately, the recent bout of inflation has not made that job any easier. In a recent survey, online financial publication Bankrate found that 55% of respondents reported feeling behind in their retirement savings, up from 52% last year (see chart below). To help bolster Americans’ […]

Earlier this month, the Treasury Department reported that the nation’s gross debt for the first time exceeded $31 trillion. Interest on these obligations is expected to be approximately $400 billion this year or about 8% of all federal revenues collected. The debt’s relatively short maturity profile means that interest rate increases will start pressuring federal […]

The latest job statistics held mixed results. The good news? Another 315,000 jobs were added to the economy, bringing the total number of people employed to just shy of the 158.87 million peak logged back in February 2020. But while the closely watched labor force participation rate inched ahead to 62.4%, it still lies below […]

Investment advisors have a mixed track record when it comes to predicting things like interest rates, stock prices, and inflation. So it was with some sympathy that I turned to a recent New York Times article that featured eight Opinion columnists’ incorrect predictions over the years. If a luminary like Paul Krugman can get things […]

Somewhere in the second quarter, the economic narrative shifted to not if we were going to have a recession, but how deep and how long it might be. We decided to take a step back and look at how we got to this point and compare today’s outlook to similar periods in the past. Over […]

Recent global events, both economic and political, have us thinking a lot about the United States’ competitive standing in the world today. How has the economic landscape changed these past few years, and do we have what it takes to keep up? Two factors determine a country’s economic growth rate. The first, the growth of […]

For most of the past decade, we didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about how to invest our clients’ cash. With short-term interest rates pegged near zero, it didn’t really matter whether your “ready” funds were in a bank deposit account, money market fund, CD, or short-term Treasury bill. Income on cash-like instruments of […]

As professional investors, we spend a lot of time thinking about how to best construct portfolios for our clients. These efforts focus on identifying the combination of assets (stocks, bonds, cash etc.) that will produce the maximum return for a desired level of risk. A whole body of research, based on vast quantities of historic […]

Companies are struggling to cope with rising wage costs. As reported in recent earnings calls, this fact seems to be true regardless of whether you are a firm trying to attract and retain hourly workers or highly paid software engineers. In some cases, the labor shortage is having an immediate impact; restaurants like Starbucks have […]

Two stock market truisms come to mind when I think about last year. The first is that “Markets climb a wall of worry.” The continued spread of COVID, rising inflation, and the threat of higher rates all weighed on investors’ minds in 2021. The second truism, “Don’t fight the Fed,” served as a kind of […]

Medical science has made tremendous strides over the past 100 years. New vaccines and antibiotics together with our understanding of the need for clean water and better food have helped global life expectancy levels more than double. And as Eric points out on page 2, the outlook for further progress is bright. But from an […]

Wall Street has a long history of coming up with “innovations.” Some new products such as Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) have truly benefitted investors. But for every one of these good ideas there have been many more that did investors harm; the collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) that played such a central role in the 2008-2009 […]