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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
A cottage industry has sprung up in the past decade with the sole focus of discrediting any good news on the economy. When President Obama was in office, the attacks mostly came from the right. With President Trump in Office, the attacks mostly come from the left. Since March 2009, regardless of who was in [...]
This Friday, the government will release its initial estimate of real GDP growth in the second quarter, and the headline is likely to look soft. At present, we're projecting an initial report of growth at a 1.8% annual rate. If our projection holds true, we're sure pessimistic analysts and investors will latch onto the slowdown [...]
The narrative that the U.S. economy is in trouble – some say teetering on the edge of recession - has become so powerful and persuasive that few investors give it a second thought. So of course, they believe, the Fed should cut interest rates. We haven't seen anything like it since the Fed was hiking [...]