You don’t need to look too far to see the negative impact that labor shortages are having on the economy. Long lines at grocery stores, restaurants with reduced hours, and childcare facilities capping enrollment are just some of the examples. As a long-time market observer, I find these persistent shortages somewhat perplexing. Under standard economic […]
News & Insights
Would you rent your furniture? Your tires?
We’ve fully embraced the rental and subscription economies, many would say. We don’t buy software in shrink-wrapped packages. We subscribe. We may buy a movie or music occasionally, but we more likely access our media through streaming services. We can get fashion from Rent the Runway. We can rent furniture too – and not the […]
Sensible wisdom never grows old
As Warren Buffett once said, “Investing is simple…but not easy.” There are only a few principles involved in being successful with money. Jonathan Clements, the Personal Finance columnist at The Wall Street Journal from 1994 to 2008, said there are only 25 different stories in Personal Finance. The trick, after you have written all 25, […]
Back to the office…Remedial education required
We here at Hanson+Doremus try to be “impactful” and “value-add.” We are all about “big data” (we read multiple newspapers!) we have “great capacity” (10+ employees!) and operate “holistically” and “sustainably” (just like the SATs, I am going to assume it is OK to guess on the meaning of some of these.) Buzzwords. Buzzwords. The […]
A quarter century on…any words of wisdom?
We have been writing this newsletter for 25 years now. We are not market forecasters. We don’t try to tell you when to buy or when to sell. We are long-term investors, almost always fully invested. We help clients decide on an appropriate level of risk, stocks versus bonds versus cash, and then we stick […]
Forget about success. Try “lying flat.”
There’s a new movement taking hold among China’s 20- and 30-somethings, and it’s absolutely antithetical to the way they grew up. Indoctrinated since birth to believe that hard work and intense drive were the only paths forward, they have been competing fiercely all their lives for top university spots, good jobs, and later, the best […]
Will there be a world without work?
In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes wrote a short essay called “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” where he envisioned technological advances enabling us to do all the work of agriculture, mining, and manufacturing with only a quarter of the human effort. Future generations, he said, would work only 15 hours a week. In fact, […]
The case for rising productivity in the U.S.
For most of the past 15 years, the U.S. has suffered from a productivity problem. Except for a spike after the 2009 Financial Crisis, productivity gains have been stuck at 1% per year over the past decade, or half the long-term average. Why does this matter? Economies that produce more with the same number of […]
Getting Goods from Here to There…
American consumers are confronting a new reality– product shortages and rising prices. To shed some light on current conditions and how we ended up in this circumstance, I reached out to my nephew Luke Doremus. Luke has spent his entire career in the shipping industry and is now Director of Sales for Ports America, the […]
Baby drought, higher deaths, lower migration…
We’re still unravelling COVID’s effects on global and national populations, but so far, this is what we’re seeing: Higher deaths as measured by “excess mortality” around the world; lower migration between countries; out-migration from big cities to smaller ones or suburbs, at least in the U.S.; and perhaps most fascinating of all, a baby drought. […]
So, How Are You Feeling?…
A lot of people have had a lot to deal with this past year. Some lost loved ones and friends. Some lost jobs, others had their income reduced. And all of us had our lives affected one way or another by being shut in at home for months. For some this meant anxiety and sadness. […]
“As long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance…”
This quote is from Chuck Prince, CEO of Citigroup, in July 2007, on why the bank loosened housing lending standards and created ever more complex derivative securities. They had to keep up with the competition. And we all know how this ended – the Housing Bubble and Great Recession of 2007-2009. Today, are we “whistling […]
