News & Insights

What do you get when you take 724 individuals and regularly track their health and happiness over eight decades? One, you get the world’s longest-running study on human happiness, known as the Harvard Study of Adult Development. Two, you get a riveting view into the most basic of human questions: What makes a good life? […]

Anyone looking to buy a house is aware of how big an impact mortgage rates have on monthly payments. At the start of 2021, rates were as low as 2.75% only to climb to above 7% last fall. For the median home in Vermont, a 2.75% mortgage works out to a monthly payment of $1,200. […]

In the spirit of transparency, it’s time to “fess up” to things we whiffed on in the past. First up, Globalization. With the publishing of Thomas Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree in 1999, globalization became a force of nature, impossible to stop and beneficial for everyone. Ugh, we got that wrong. Today globalization […]

On the surface there are big differences between youth unemployment rates in the U.S. and China. In China, the rate for 16 to 24-year-olds is over 20%. For recent college grads in the U.S., it is only 4%, although to be fair, it jumps to 9% for 16 to 19-year-olds — still only about half […]

If you have spent much time with anyone under the age of 30 the last few years, you can be forgiven for thinking that online shopping is taking over the retail world. The shift to e-commerce accelerated during the pandemic as even the most digitally unaware worked to avoid in-person contact. In 2020, for example, […]

“Let’s go and invent tomorrow rather than worry about yesterday,” Steve Jobs once boldly declared. “Show me a problem, and I’ll look for a technology to fix it,” said Bill Gates. These words, and many like them from other tech luminaries, perfectly capture the techno-optimism that has become so ascendant today – a shared vision […]

Every year at the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, Warren Buffett gives shareholders insights into his investment thinking and keys to long-term success. At the May meeting, Buffett observed that over the past 58 years he has made only a dozen or so truly great decisions. This works out to about one every five years. You […]

With the banking crisis and collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) in March, and now First Republic, we were anxious to take a look at the recently reported first quarter bank earnings. The following is a brief summary of what we learned. Deposit flows were not straightforward. Deposit flight—a bank run—is ulti­mately what doomed SVB, […]

U.S. population growth has started edging higher again after hitting an alarming all-time low during the pandemic. According to the latest Census data, from July 2021 to July 2022, the U.S. population grew 0.38%. Admittedly, that’s still not great – it’s one of the lowest growth rates since 1900. But it’s better than the extraordinarily […]

In 2015 Xi Jinping announced the “Made in China 2025” initiative. The objective was to move China away from laborintensive, lower-wage industries to more technology-focused ones. The Chinese identified 10 priority sectors where it wanted to compete, and dominate. These included semiconductors, aerospace, biotech, AI, robotics, and electric vehicles. Achieving success would mean faster GDP […]

In my estimation, The Economist weekly newspaper (yes, that’s how they refer to themselves) is the single best read for world economics and politics. The newspaper favors centrist governments and has little reporting bias and rigorous fact checking. What they said recently in a front page section on America is both unexpected and encouraging. We […]