Fed Rate Increase – A Slow Down
The S&P 500 jumped about 3% last Wednesday after Fed Chair Jerome Powell delivered remarks at the Brookings Institution.
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Dec 5 -
Nov 28A Somewhat Optimistic View of the 2023 US Economy
Goldman Sachs has issued a relatively upbeat view of the US economy in 2023, arguing that we are more likely than not to avoid a recession in 2023.
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Nov 21Navigating the Market Downturn
2022 has been a terrible year for investors, as equities have undergone a bear market and bonds have had their worst year in decades.
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Nov 14Finally, Good Inflation News
Thursday’s inflation report contained the good news that markets and the Fed were hoping for.
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Oct 24Nuclear War is… Unpredictable
Elon Musk recently expressed his concern that the Russian invasion of Ukraine may be leading the world down the path to nuclear war, and his belief that a ...
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Oct 10Unemployment and The Fed
Friday’s unemployment report showed an economy that is starting to cool, but only slowly. The unemployment rate dipped to 3.5%, largely due to labor force shrinkage and a ...
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Oct 3Facebook's Faceplant
Though many stocks have struggled this year, few have fallen as far as Meta, Facebook’s parent company:
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Sep 30Quarterly Market Commentary
Third Quarter 2022 Key Takeaways. Markets again endured an ugly quarter, as equities slid once more into bear territory and bonds continued their historically poor performance.
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Sep 26Winter Is Coming
Inflation isn’t just a United States problem—it also poses an enormous challenge to Europe. The European dilemma is particularly acute because Europe is also facing an ...
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Sep 19Rising Rates Everywhere
The Fed meets again this week, when it is expected to continue its rate hike regime in an effort to combat inflation.
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Sep 12Jackson Hole – The Dovish Case
Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s August 26th speech at Jackson Hole made clear the Fed’s intention to bring inflation to heel, even at the cost of significant ...
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Sep 6Jackson Hole – The Fed Update
Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s August 26th speech at Jackson Hole made clear the Fed’s intention to bring inflation to heel, even at the cost of significant ...
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Aug 29Market Adaptations
We wrote last week about the extension of a $7,500 credit for new “clean” vehicles, noting the new requirement that such cars be built from minerals sourced or processed ...
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Aug 22Mineral Supply Chains
The Inflation Reduction Act that President Biden signed last week continued a $7,500 credit for various new electric cars, plug-in hybrids, and hydrogen fuel cell cars, but with strings ...
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Aug 15Inflation Reduction Act and Electric Cars
President Biden is expected to soon sign the Inflation Reduction Act that Congress passed last week.
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Aug 8Diversified - Emerging Markets
A diversified portfolio typically includes some degree of investment in emerging markets. Schwab’s quarterly chart book has a nice metric showing the relative appeal of foreign investments:
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Aug 1Are We in a Recession?
The Q2 2022 GDP report came in last week and GDP fell for the quarter, as it did in Q1 2022. Does this mean we’re in a recession? Officially, ...
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Jul 28Economic Signals Are Mixed
The COVID economy has been very unusual. We saw a sharp downturn in GDP and equities and a massive increase in unemployment...
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Jul 28
Quarterly Market Commentary
Second Quarter 2022 Key Takeaways. When we looked back at the first quarter of 2022, we saw a quarter in which markets struggled, but the downturn could have been much ...
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Jul 5Is a Recession Priced In?
With the S&P 500 in bear market territory and the Fed rapidly raising interest rates, it’s understandable to suggest that equities markets, by virtue of their ...
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Jun 27Inflation History, Revised
Leuthold’s historical analysis of the S&P 500 provides a major note of concern. Bloomberg’s Lu Wang describes these bad-case scenarios outlined by Leuthold that show ...
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Jun 20How Low Can We Go?
2022 has not been a good year for markets. This past week we finally entered bear market territory, as the S&P 500’s losses eclipsed the 20% mark.
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Jun 13Inflation’s Continued Onslaught
The personal income and outlays report issued by the Commerce Department at the end of May, as well as the recent strong jobs market report...
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Jun 6Has Inflation Finally Peaked?
The consumer price index report comes out Friday, and may provide a degree of clarity about the current path of inflation. One hopeful hint was found in the ...
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May 24UK and US Share Challenges
While the S&P 500 is currently flirting with bear market territory, as it nears a 20% drop from its peak, the Fed is currently trying to engineer a ...
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May 16Protection From The Fed “Put” May Be History
Back when Alan Greenspan was Fed Chair, from 1987-2006, he became known for the “Greenspan put”, by which the Fed would often respond to falling stock prices
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May 9Fed Update
Fed Update5/9/22 The Fed continued its rate hike regime with a 50bp increase last Wednesday. While Fed Chair Jerome Powell indicated that future 75bp increases were unlikely, he ...
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May 4
Quarterly Market Commentary
First Quarter 2022 Key Takeaways. Inflation, war, and COVID. Perhaps the world could have returned to pre‐COVID days if it faced only one of these challenges, but we ...
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May 2US Recession... Or Not?
US Recession… Or Not?5/2/22 Is a Recession Coming? Interest rates are rising and the unemployment rate can’t get much lower. Given these circumstances, it does seem plausible ...
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Apr 25Russia and Clean Energy
Global crises can have unintended consequences. One potential outcome of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is the acceleration of clean energy production
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Apr 18Commodities and the Economy
We’ve seen a sharp rise in the prices of many commodities over the past two years. Two examples of this are metals prices and oil prices.
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Apr 11Synthetic Fermentation
There’s been enough grim news this year—high inflation, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the S&P’s 2022 slide come to mind immediately
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Apr 4Interconnectedness
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has spurred debate in Europe about reducing its reliance on Russian natural gas.
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Mar 28Possible Pathways
The Fed raised rates 0.25% this month; it is likely the first of several rate hikes this year.
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Mar 21Inflation Expectations
The main rationale for optimism about the future path of inflation is that longer-term inflation expectations are still anchored reasonably close to the Fed’s 2% target.
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Mar 14Update on the Inflation Picture
Inflation in February climbed to 7.9%, and core inflation rose to 6.4%; each of these numbers represent the highest mark since 1982.
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Mar 7Oil = Nickel
While many long-term ramifications of the Russian invasion of Ukraine are murky, one clear short-term consequence has been a sharp increase in oil prices.
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Feb 28Russia – Ukraine and the Markets
How will the Russian invasion of Ukraine affect markets? While there have been large impacts so far on Russian markets and on the value of the ruble.
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Feb 22Emerging Markets - Taking the Lead
The MSCI Emerging Markets (EM) Index fell 2.5% in US denominated returns in 2021.
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Feb 14Current Inflation Expectations
7% inflation is bad, but the even more critical issue is whether this high rate of inflation is likely to dissipate or to stay with us for a long ...
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Feb 7What Happened to Facebook’s Meta?
Facebook parent Meta released a weak earnings report last week. How weak was it?
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Jan 31How Did Forecasters Miss Inflation?
In twenty years economists may sagely nod with the wisdom of hindsight and argue how 7% inflation and 5% core inflation in 2021 were inevitable given constrained supply and stimulated demand.
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Jan 24The Economy in Charts
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then charts may provide a better view of the economy than pages of verbiage.
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Jan 21
Quarterly Market Commentary
Fourth Quarter 2021 Key Takeaways. If the market resurgence paused in the 3rd quarter of 2021, it then rebounded in the 4th quarter, at least for the headline‐grabbing domestic ...
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Jan 17Car Trouble
When Jerome Powell described last year’s inflation surge as largely transitory in nature, we all had the hopes that that would mean that pandemic-related supply and demand...
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Jan 10Surveying the Market
What do fund managers expect for 2022? Bloomberg’s John Authers discusses a set of survey results on economic expectations for the upcoming year.
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Jan 3The Value of Vehicles
We’ve all witnessed the explosive growth of Tesla stock, which has reached a market capitalization of over $1 trillion.
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Dec 27Impossible to See, the Future Is
Who spoke the words of wisdom above? We’ll get to that in a minute. But as 2021 gives way to 2022, we want to take a moment to look ...
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Dec 20The Fed Take On Inflation
On Wednesday, the Fed held its December meeting and adopted a significantly more aggressive posture to combating the inflation surge of 2021.
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Dec 13Global Markets Taking Omicron in Stride
The omicron variant, first detected in South Africa in late November and spreading rapidly, appeared to threaten the current equities bull run as markets began to swoon after ...
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Dec 6EM and ESG
As emerging economies grow, their markets may increasingly resemble those of developed markets.
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Nov 30Inflation Protection
Although US GDP and the unemployment rate have recovered remarkably quickly, this progress has come with the cost of higher inflation...
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Nov 15Some Economic Data Is Turning Partisan
Last week we noted a massive partisan gap with respect to the direction of this country.
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Nov 8A Confluence of Good News
Investment management firms are in the business of forecasting the future, particularly those with a heavy emphasis on active management.
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Nov 1PIMCO’s Secular Outlook – A Summary
Investment management firms are in the business of forecasting the future, particularly those with a heavy emphasis on active management.
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Oct 26Interest Rate Normalization
After its November 3rd meeting, the Fed is expected to announce a tapering of its asset purchase program...
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Oct 21Quarterly Market Commentary
Third Quarter 2021 Key Takeaways. The market rebound may not be over, but it took a break in the third quarter of 2021.
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Oct 19Economists on Inflation
Years ago, one of us at JMS had a teacher who had a poster tacked up in his classroom that showed a chimpanzee deep in thought.
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Oct 11September’s Mixed Jobs Report
The September jobs report provided fodder for economic pessimists and optimists.
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Oct 4Supply Chain Under Strain
Fed Chair Jerome Powell has regularly expressed the hope that the current inflation spike would be transitory. He may well be proven correct..
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Sep 28China’s Evergrande
On Monday equities slipped markedly, with the S&P 500 down nearly 2% and other global markets down even more.
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Sep 20Risks to the Market
On Monday equities slipped markedly, with the S&P 500 down nearly 2% and other global markets down even more.
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Sep 13Balancing Retirement Goals
In 1950, Americans who made it to the retirement age of 65 could expect on average to live another 14 years; by 2010 this number had risen to 19 years.
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Aug 30The Fed’s Jackson Hole Update
Last week Fed Chair Jerome Powell gave a closely watched speech at the Fed’s annual Jackson Hole, Wyoming, symposium.
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Aug 23Checking in on Inflation
This spring we discussed JP Morgan’s annual energy report, which sounded a note of skepticism regarding how quickly we can expect to transition away from fossil fuels ...
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Aug 9The Importance of Infrastructure
As the bipartisan infrastructure bill advances through the Senate, its fate still uncertain upon reaching the House of Representatives...
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Aug 2The Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill
In an increasingly rare moment of bipartisan unity, a group of Republican and Democratic Senators, along with President Biden...
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Jul 27US China Tensions Linger
President Trump attracted a great deal of attention through his stance towards China, including his implementation of tariffs against numerous Chinese goods.
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Jul 22Quarterly Market Commentary
Second Quarter 2021 Key Takeaways, The second quarter of 2021 for equities marked a continuation of the remarkable recovery since the COVID downturn in early 2020.
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Jul 19Biden’s Economic Executive Orders
Earlier this month President Biden signed an executive order encompassing 72 actions and recommendations aimed at increasing competition and limiting anti-competitive practices
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Jul 5Corporate Tax Rates May Get an International Standard
Last week 130 countries agreed to a corporate tax framework with a minimum tax rate of 15%.
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Jun 28The End of the Beginning of an Infrastructure Bill
On Thursday, the White House reached a preliminary agreement with a bipartisan group of senators on infrastructure investments.
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Jun 21The Fed – Back in the News Again
Lumber price surged this spring to record levels, spurring concerns about the Fed’s relative nonchalance towards inflation.
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Jun 14Aduhelm’s Impact on Healthcare
Biogen’s treatment for Alzheimer’s disease was unexpectedly approved last week by the FDA. The ruling was a surprise given that the FDA’s advisory had voted ...
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Jun 7The Electric Vehicle Market
The good news for electric vehicle manufacturers is that battery costs have been plummeting over time, and that the cost of electric vehicles may soon achieve parity with ...
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Jun 1The Energy Revolution May Be a Long and Winding Road
Although it’s pulled back from its peak, Tesla’s stock has still risen more than tenfold in the past two years.
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May 25Inflation and the Money Stock
The combination of dovish monetary policy and stimulative fiscal policy has given rise to inflation fears.
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May 19Checking in on Speculative Investments
Here’s the current 10-year breakeven inflation rate, which reflects market expectations of the average inflation rate over the next 10 years.
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