How the Federal Reserve is like Spike from Happy Days
As a child of the 70s, I have come to embrace a few, eternal truths: disco should have never died; big collars were a good idea, and the Fonz was the coolest guy who ever lived. Speaking of the Fonz, I am reminded of a…
It’s always darkest before the dawn
It is one thing to understand we are living through an unprecedented, pandemic driven economic downturn, and all together another to learn the US unemployment rate is 14.7% and that 20.5 million of our fellow Americans lost their jobs in April. The numbers are shocking,…
Pick a letter, any letter
We got our first look at Q1 Gross Domestic Product last week, and as expected, it wasn’t pretty. While the Q1 GDP number is subject to revision, it showed the economy contracted (4.8%) Q to Q. If one considers that the coronavirus didn’t hit the…
Positioning yourself as a behavioral coach
While there is plenty of economic upside to the specialization required of modern life, one downside is that hyper-specialization can lead to siloed thinking. For a psychologist like me, the hammer that I have (an understanding of the power of behavior) can lead me to…
How can oil be worth less than nothing?
They say if you live long enough you really do see everything. Well, last week investors saw something they had never seen before – the price of a barrel of oil going for negative $37, at least based on the May 2020 futures contract on…
Putting politics aside
We live in red or blue states; we tune into liberal or conservative media outlets; our President is either Making America Great Again or an existential threat to our Republic; on it goes. Yet, consider how policymakers—including House Speaker Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader McConnell, and…
Creative destruction
Economist Joseph Schumpeter coined the phrase “creative destruction” to describe the way innovation in the manufacturing process increases productivity while destroying the old way of doing things as a new efficient way is developed. This idea has been expanded to many other contexts as we…
Vlog: Quarter-end Q&A 1Q2020
Tim Holland, CFA, Global Investment Strategist, asks and answers three top-of-mind questions as investors receive their quarterly statements and reflect on the past quarter: Have we seen the bottom in the stock market? Have the Federal Reserve and the Federal Government done enough in response…