24
03, 2020
24
03, 2020
A Message from Michael Rogan
Dear Friends and Clients, I want to start by commending our Clients on your overall response to this truly unprecedented situation we all find ourselves in. Many of you have been with us through one, or even several, declines and we are gratified that our educational message seems to have been taken to heart. As [...]
23
03, 2020
The Coronavirus Contraction – Wesbury’s Latest Outlook
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 [...]
25
02, 2020
Time to Fear the Coronavirus? – Brian Wesbury
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 [...]
22
01, 2020
Moderate Growth in Q4 – Wesbury’s Outlook
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 [...]
27
08, 2019
Business Uncertainty – Wesbury’s Outlook
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 [...]
15
08, 2019
The Inverted Yield Curve and Impending Doom?
Our media loves a "good" story, even if they have to invent one. Today’s story from Media Groupthink Central (MGC) is the yield curve for US Treasuries has inverted and therefore is signaling an impending recession. Several carefully worded stories to this effect have been printed recently, along with others written more sloppily so as [...]
5
08, 2019
Wesbury’s Outlook – The Flailing Fed
The Fed is flailing. For the past several years, under the leadership of both Jerome Powell and, before that, Janet Yellen, the Fed claimed it was "data dependent." But the decision last week to reduce short-term rates by 25 basis points tore that narrative to shreds. At the prior Federal Reserve meeting in mid-June, a [...]
3
07, 2019
Wesbury’s Outlook – The Longest Expansion
As of today, the current economic expansion is the longest in US history. Ten years and a day. But just because it's the longest doesn't mean it's the best. The expansions of the 1960s, 1980s, and 1990s, all beat it out both in terms of the pace of growth as well as the total growth [...]