In my class on Personal Finance at the University of Vermont I tell students that they are very lucky. America is just 4% of the world’s population but it produces (inside our borders) 25% of everything produced in the world. America is still a powerhouse. But with COVID-19 we have another distinction that is not […]
Eric Hanson
Cash is King or Cash is Trash?..
At the start of the COVID-19 Pandemic it looked like cash was headed for the trash bin. Bills are dirty and who really wants to handle cash every time you make a purchase? Much cleaner and safer to use a debit or credit card. Cash usage did drop slightly this winter and spring as a […]
Wall Street Versus Main Street…Is There Something I’m Missing Here?…
Is this crazy or what? On the one hand we are in the middle of the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression and the worst medical crisis since the 1918 Pandemic. At the same time the S&P 500 has increased nearly 4% this year and the Nasdaq Composite is up a whopping 22%. We […]
“For It Is In Giving That We Receive…”
Ah, food for the soul from Francis of Assisi. Wonderful advice for us personally but not necessarily helpful advice if you are a State Treasurer in the U.S. States and municipalities are reeling today financially and trying to squeeze blood from every turnip. They need cash and they need it quick, especially from Washington. We […]
Am I Just Paranoid or is This ‘Cold War 2’?…
The Chinese have a long memory. They remember the unequal treaties they were forced to sign in the mid-19th century ceding valuable trade and treaty ports to European powers. To us it might seem ancient history. To them it is still very much alive and the humiliation is still very much felt. The ultimate goal […]
Coronavirus Consequences…
GREEN ENERGY NOT DOWN FOR THE COUNT The price of crude oil is down 75% from 10 years ago. The futures price even went below zero for a short period last month. You might assume that very cheap oil would have spelt doom for Green Energy, the energy produced by wind and solar. You would […]
Ditching The Premises. A Report From The Front Line…
March 17, 2020 was the day Hanson & Doremus officially moved online, everyone working from home. The big question was, could business still function without the office? The reassuring answer was yes it could, business has continued quite seamlessly and mostly uninterrupted. In discussions with employees the consensus is that we are just as productive […]
How Do We Get Back To Working?…
A character in an Ernest Hemingway novel once said that bankruptcy happens “two ways: gradually, then suddenly.” This is how we have experienced Covid-19. The question now is, how soon can the economy be restarted? Wall Street will not find its bearings until we get some idea about Main Street. Here is a stab at […]
We Are All Amateur Epidemiologists Now…
There is no cure for Covid-19 today so the best we can do is figure out who has the virus (symptoms or no symptoms) and try to mitigate the spread. Other countries had their principal outbreak before us and might offer us public health lessons to learn from. China was slow to admit to the […]
The Market Doesn’t Mind Bad News…
What it minds is uncertainty. And uncertainty is what we have today. No one really knows how bad the novel coronavirus outbreak will get and how far it will spread. On the economic front no one knows how badly all this will affect the global economy and how long it will take for things to […]
It’s Official…Novel Coronavirus is Now a Pandemic…
…an outbreak which has spread throughout the world. This according to the World Health Organization (WHO). The worst pandemic of the last century was the “Spanish” flu of 1918 which infected one-third of the world’s population and killed 50 to 100 million people, including nearly 700,000 in the U.S. No one expects this one to […]
Your Supply Chain is Your Destiny…
The coronavirus, which first appeared in Wuhan China, is not only causing medical risk in China but also breeding fear and even panic worldwide. The coronavirus causes a range of respiratory illnesses ranging from the common cold to severe outcomes, even death. So far, the virus is only moderately infectious, but no one knows much […]
