While Stocks Stumble, Financial Conditions Remain on Firm Footing
It has been a rough start to the year for risk assets with the S&P 500 off 7%+ and US small cap stocks and US growth stocks down even more. Most investors continue to cite the hawkish pivot by the Fed and the backing up…
You Can’t Buy What They Don’t Have to Sell
Nearly two years into the pandemic, our country continues to confront production and sourcing challenges that are leaving, at least episodically, any number of small-ticket items (think toilet paper) and big-ticket items (think new cars) in short supply. Those supply chain challenges along with a…
If We Could Only Keep One Thing in Mind in 2022….
Happy New Year! We hope you all had a wonderful holiday season and we wish you and your loved ones a happy, healthy, and prosperous 2022. As we kick off a new year, the world is – as expected and maybe even more so this…
Negative Real Rates Help. Negative Real Wage Gains? Not So Much.
We have written often of late about real interest rates – which are typically arrived at by adjusting a benchmark rate such as the Fed Funds Rate for the rate of inflation, measured, for example, by the Consumer Price Index. Specifically, real rates are positive…
It’s Not Much, But We’ll Take It
Excluding this awful pandemic, we think most market observers would cite inflation as the greatest risk to the economy and markets. More specifically, the risk that inflation remains high or moves higher, forcing the Fed to tighten monetary policy quicker than it wants, putting the…
Omicron & The Fed Upend The Markets
After a week away for the Thanksgiving holiday, we are happy to be taking pen to paper to share our thoughts on the economy and markets. While our Thanksgiving was great–and we hope yours was too–the post-Thanksgiving period has been anything but for investors. The…
Do As I Do, Not As I Say
As parents, many of us have uttered the immortal phrase, “do as I say, not as I do.” And while that phrase can be confusing to a child, it is easily explained; please follow my advice, even if yours truly is not (boy, have I…
The Consumer Price Index Jumps 6.2%….Now What?
We pivot again to inflation this week. The catalyst for taking pen to paper this time on the topic is the 6.2% year-on-year jump in the October Consumer Price Index, a data point that was released by the Labor Department on November 10th. October saw…
The Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow “Nowcast” Taketh and Giveth
One of the more well-reported stories of the past several months was the deceleration in economic growth as we moved through the third quarter. As we now know, the Delta variant and snarled supply chains and labor shortages, among other challenges, conspired to (somewhat) put…
When Deeply Negative is Highly Positive
At the risk of going to the inflation well one too many times, we are writing about inflation once again this week as we believe it remains – outside of the coronavirus – the topic of greatest concern among investors. It is also an incredibly…