Due to fears about the Coronavirus – more specifically, the forceful government measures designed to halt its spread, the US is on the front edge of the sharpest decline in economic activity since the Great Depression. The US economy was on track to grow at around a 3.0% annual rate in the first quarter before [...]
We are in the midst of a Coronavirus Contraction. The news keeps highlighting worst case scenarios. The markets are volatile. Data in the months ahead may get ugly. But this too shall pass. How do we navigate this storm until the clouds part? https://youtu.be/7pazQdPe2Ws
Brian S. Wesbury, Chief Economist Robert Stein, Deputy Chief Economist Date: 3/16/2020 Back in July 2008, then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson said he wanted a "bazooka" to deal with financial threats to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Paulson wanted Congress to give him an unlimited credit line for these enterprises. This time around, it's the Federal [...]
Less than a month ago markets were at a record high, as healthy data on the US economy signaled continued growth on the horizon. Then, as Coronavirus made its way to continental Europe and the United States, markets went into a tailspin, suffering one of the fastest declines on record. The last several weeks have [...]
We thought we would interrupt your daily routine with an update on the current panic/crisis du jour. if you have taken our advice and are not watching the news, then you can stop reading here and continue to go about your lives. If, however, you’re like most of us and find it nearly impossible [...]
We’re moved to check in with you today as it has come to our attention that some of you may have not heeded our long-standing advice and have been watching the mainstream news media (MSM). Specifically as it portends to the most recent outbreak of a strain of viruses known as coronaviruses, first discovered in [...]
Monday, fear over the Coronavirus finally gripped investors, as both the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 index fell over 3% - the largest daily declines in two years. These drops wiped out all the gains for the year. Frankly, it's amazing to us that the market had been so resilient! Maybe it's [...]
One of the worst bipartisan policy decisions in the past generation was the aggressive government push in the 1990s and 2000s to promote homeownership, beyond what the free market could handle. Policymakers encouraged Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to gobble up lots of subprime debt, in turn boosting lending to borrowers who couldn't handle their [...]
Back in mid-November, the highly respected GDP forecasting model from the Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank (also known as "GDP Now"), estimated that real GDP would only grow at a 0.3% annual rate in the fourth quarter, which, if accurate, would have been the slowest growth for any quarter since 2015. At the time, we were [...]