A year ago, conventional wisdom became convinced that a stock market correction was really the beginning of a "bear market," and a sure sign that recession was on its way. Oops. Conventional wisdom was wrong again. The Pouting Pundits still talk about ISM surveys being weak, and fret that a trade war is brewing. But, [...]
Since the earliest days of the current economic expansion, there have been naysayers asserting the US was on the brink of another recession. Remember all the fear about another wave of home foreclosures, or a disaster in commercial real estate, or the Fiscal Cliff, or Greece potentially leaving the Eurozone, or German bank defaults, or [...]
In Ronald Reagan's famous A Time For Choosing speech in 1964, he said "...the more the plans fail, the more the planners plan." We were reminded of this recently after pundits freaked out when the New York Federal Reserve injected reserves into the banking system to keep some short-term rates from rising. A few things [...]
Never underestimate the ability of politicians to mess up a good thing. They're certainly trying in Washington, D.C. Unfortunately, many people are concerned about the wrong thing. Nice even numbers fascinate people, and through the first eleven months of this fiscal year (October 2018 through August 2019), the U.S. budget deficit was over $1 trillion [...]
"We are all Keynesians now," is a phrase that caught on in the late 1960s and early 1970s, variously attributed to Milton Friedman and President Richard Nixon. Uncle Milty was commenting on the general political/economic environment, not saying he was a Keynesian. Richard Nixon, on the other hand, actually said "I am now a Keynesian." [...]
Analysts were very quick to pin the blame for weakness in stocks late last week on the trade war with China. We agree that uncertainty regarding the future of US-China trade relations was a drag on equities, but think it was far from the only reason for weakness. In fact, it wasn't even the most [...]
The threat of a recession is on the minds of investors. Some traditional measures of the yield curve are inverted and, in the past, those have preceded recessions. The link between an inverted yield curve and a recession has so dominated recent financial news that for some investors it's no longer a matter of whether [...]
