News

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 […]

CNBC recently reported that 72% of recent homebuyers feel regret about their purchase — either because they paid too much or because they rushed the process and made too many concessions. Whether that survey is robust or accurately reflects reality, I don’t know. But I certainly can believe there is regret out there — because […]

Two thousand years ago China and India were the world’s largest economies. As recently as the early 1800s China was still the world’s largest. The final one hundred years of the Qing Dynasty, however, brought the country to its knees, and it was not until the ascension of Deng Xiaoping in 1978 that rapid growth […]

You might call it Korea’s splurge of the summer. Writer Se-Woong Koo, in his excellent English-language blog Korea Exposé, calls it an “over-the-top affair” and “the-most-talked-about delicacy of the season.” Others I know just call it excessive and ridiculous. What we’re talking about is a Korean dessert called bingsu, a traditional treat that Koreans long […]

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 […]

In fact, with all due respect to Mick Jagger and the Stones, you can’t get what you need now either. Global supply chains still are roiling profits and plans. In General Electric’s last earnings call, the words “supply chain” came up 24 times. For General Motors, they appeared 14 times. And for Tesla, there were […]

The U.S. population grew 0.1% last year, the slowest rate on record. Births exceeded deaths by only 148k. This low number may be temporary, caused by the increase in Covid deaths and the delay in some births due to economic turmoil. But the fact is, the U.S. birth rate has been coming down. Between 1990 […]

And I hope I am very much wrong. I am worried that today’s economy is like the period 1965-1982. Back then the economy was overheating from the costs of the Vietnam War and Great Society social spending. Congress was unwilling to raise taxes to cool the economy, and the Federal Reserve was in a classic […]

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 […]

According to a recent survey by the Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies, 69% of Americans said they were confident about being able to retire comfortably. While that doesn’t seem like a half-bad number, the other side of the coin is that 31% are worried – some deeply so — that they won’t be able to […]

We will deal with the ugly and the bad first, then get to the good. Just look at the chart below right. It gets a lot of people really agitated. Imports have exceeded exports for years, and even though the chart says exports are improving a bit (relatively), we will not get to a balanced […]

I have always been interested in money, not from the standpoint of what it can buy or how we can use it to invest, but from the standpoint of psychology. Money is the ultimate confidence game. The dollar is not backed by anything today. It is worth what it will buy, and we are confident […]