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Bi-Weekly Economic Review
Economic Reports Scorecard The Federal Reserve is widely expected to raise interest rates again at their meeting next week. They obviously view the recent cyclical upturn as being durable and the...
View Article(Political) Logic
According to Larry Summers, the Trump administration’s recently released budget contains a most heinous elementary error that disqualifies the whole thing and every single person involved in it. Apart...
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Bi-Weekly Economic Review: The Return of Economic Ennui
The economic reports released since the last of these updates was generally not all that bad but the reports considered more important were disappointing. And it should be noted that economic reports...
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Bi-Weekly Economic Review: Draghi Moves Markets
In my last update two weeks ago I commented on the continued weakness in the economic data. The economic surprises were overwhelmingly negative and our market based indicators confirmed that weakness....
View ArticleQuestions
We often have discussions in the office that consist primarily of asking questions. Sometimes they are questions we don’t think people are asking enough, sometimes questions we are sick of hearing and...
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Bi-Weekly Economic Review: Attention Shoppers
The majority of the economic reports over the last two weeks have been disappointing, less than the consensus expectations. The minor rebound in activity we’ve been tracking since last summer appears...
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Global Asset Allocation Update: Not Yet
There is no change to the risk budget this month. For the moderate risk investor, the allocation between risk assets and bonds is unchanged at 50/50. There are no changes to the portfolio this month....
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Questions
Why are profit margins persistently high? With decent earnings this quarter, corporate profits as a % of GDP will approach (maybe exceed) 10% again. That is abnormally high compared to the period 1960...
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Officially A No-growth World
I really don’t think people quite understand just how much trouble China is in right now. That’s no mystery because in the Western media the Chinese economy is almost always described as somewhere...
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Political Economics
Who President Trump ultimately picks as the next Federal Reserve Chairman doesn’t really matter. Unless he goes really far afield to someone totally unexpected, whoever that person will be will be...
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Taking Turns With The B(L)S
The worst aspect of this economy is by far the real effects pressed upon especially American workers. Of that there is no doubt, including young adults who would be working rather than “studying” if...
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Global Asset Allocation Update: Tariffs Don’t Warrant A Change…Yet
There is no change to the risk budget this month. For the moderate risk investor the allocation to bonds is 50%, risk assets 45% and cash 5%. We have had continued volatility since the last update but...
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Whose Tightening Is It Anyway?
I suppose it’s only fair. After all, they started it. Earlier in the year, Federal Reserve officials including Chairman Jay Powell suggested it was all Trump’s fault. The abrupt difficulties presented...
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China’s Nineties Fears, Not Just Japan
The year 2012 was a turning point, there can be no doubts about that. At least not when objectively and honestly reviewing the data. Up until the worldwide slowdown that hit that year, starting the...
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The Populist Pathology
The populist pathology is incredibly simple; no one ever takes the blame. Things continually go off-track and officials merely shrug their shoulders and point their fingers. The very idea of...
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Elections And Morbid Contango
As always, it’s about the whole thing. A true economic boom spreads out real gains to the vast majority of the population. There will always be some proportion of people who are left out. But in the...
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Retail Sales, The More Immediate Problem
How quickly hope can sour. That is, if it is based on suspect assumptions and a misreading of the general situation. It would then be more like irrational pleading than derived from solid analysis. One...
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Monthly Macro Monitor – January 2019
A Return To Normalcy In the first two years after a newly elected President takes office he enacts a major tax cut that primarily benefits the wealthy and significantly raises tariffs on imports. His...
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The Rate Cut Boom
All Presidents love to talk stocks when the stock market is making record highs. It is the one asset class the public knows about. Even the iconic 1980’s movie Wall Street made it seem just that...
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Trade Wars Have Arrived, But It’s Trade Winter That Hurts
There is truth to the trade war. That’s a big problem because it’s not the only problem. It isn’t even the main one. Given that, it’s easy to look at tariffs and see all our current ills in them. The...
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