News

After an historically fast and furious campaign of interest rate hikes to combat inflation, the Federal Reserve is ready to cut at its meeting this week. Why are cuts coming now, and what do they mean for you and me? The Fed is all about its “dual mandate” of price stability and maximum employment. They […]

Standard economic theory holds that rising demand leads to higher prices and falling demand, lower prices. When supply exactly matches demand, a “clearing” price or fair value is reached. In the real world, however, things do not always work out this way. In some cases, prices fail to adjust to shifting supply and demand because […]

“Everyone’s health generally declines with time, and sooner or later we all die, so the question we all must answer is how to make the most of our finite time on earth.” “. . . if you knew you were going to die tomorrow, you’d spend today one way, and if it was two days […]

In August, I had the pleasure of attending the Summer Olympics in Paris. Over a delightful but very hot week there, a few thoughts popped into my head—observations about the event from someone who spends too much time over-analyzing everything. The commercialization of sports is nothing new, but the resulting proliferation of sponsorships at the […]

In a recent issue, The Economist predicted that by the mid-2030s, solar cells will represent the single greatest source of energy for electrical generation globally. To get a sense of just how big a claim this is, consider that today coal, at 36%, is the largest source and solar stands at just 6%. While the […]

In an earlier edition of the newsletter, we reported on a study done by the ARC Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research. They found that the age at which financial mistakes are minimized is on average age 53 or 54. This means we stumble through a lot of financial errors from high school to […]

It’s been more than four years since the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a global pandemic on March 11, 2020. Covid is still very much with us — in fact, there’s a surge in infections now, as there has been every summer since 2020. But we’ve come a long way from the dark pre-vaccine days […]

Every country has culinary specialties influenced by other places as food cultures eventually meld together. Rarely does it become political. In the U.S., we’ve got hamburgers (who knows where they came from). In the U.K., it’s curries and chicken tikka masala. In the Netherlands, they have rijsttafel (inspired by the Indonesian “rice table”). In Germany, […]

ChatGPT, when first released back in late 2022, made a splash. AI technologies, and more specifically the large language models (LLMs) they are based on, had been around for years. But this AI chatbot was one of the first easy-to-use products capable of generating a range of written content in response to prompts – and […]

Those aren’t my words. I heard them from Shuntaro Takeuchi, a portfolio manager at Matthews Asia, and he wasn’t referring to the 1980 pop song by the Vapors, but to how aging around the globe is making the rest of the developed world look more like Japan. With 30% of its population over 65, Japan […]

In 1831, 26-year-old Alexis de Tocqueville spent ten months in America and Canada. Returning to France, he wrote Democracy in America (1835-1840), a book of observations about America and what aristocratic Europe might learn from it. Tocqueville admired the stability of the American economy, the popularity of churches, and how the spirit of religion and […]

Our lives over the last 20 years have moved increasingly online as everything from newspapers to banking have gone digital. Every year more people make all of their daily purchases via credit cards. Fewer than 14% of Americans in 2022 made all or almost all their purchases in a typical week with cash versus 41% […]