News

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 […]

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 […]

Corporate profits still are rising, and that’s good news in a world with plenty to worry about. War, inflation, political divisiveness, take your pick — you’d be forgiven for thinking things are going to hell in a handbasket. But at least for now, corporate sales and earnings are staying resilient. According to FactSet, 77% of […]

The first thing that is apparent today is that Western sanctions against Russia have not brought the country to its knees (see chart right). For sure if you are looking for high-end Western brands or a McDonald’s burger, then sanctions have taken a bite, but Russia in general is a closed economy. It manufactures internally […]

It has been a while since we have experienced a traditional recession and bear market. The COVID recession of February 2020 was a different kind. It was short (two months), and the bear market (one month) was very quick. Before COVID, you have to go all the way back to the housing crisis of December […]