Any disaster – be it a plane crash or a nuclear plant meltdown – is subsequently found to be caused by multiple failures. The Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) demise is no different. Who is to blame and what does this mean for the safety of your money in your bank or brokerage account? Here’s my…
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The year 2022 will go down in my book as the worst year in history for the U.S. investment markets. Why do I assert that so strongly? It’s because of what happened to bonds. The S&P 500 lost -18.1%, making 2022 merely the seventh worst year since 1926. But that wasn’t the main story. The…
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After the so-called Great Recession of 2008, the Federal Reserve (Fed) began buying up large quantities of bonds and other securities. This policy of quantitative easing (QE), as it became known, was part of the “pump priming” effort by the government to increase liquidity and stabilize the financial system in order to get the economy…
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With mid-term elections just around the corner, the Washington blame game is heating up. Republicans are asserting that the upsurge in inflation we’ve been living with since the beginning of this year is all due to the Democrats’ American Rescue Plan that pumped billions of unnecessary dollars into the economy. Democrats counter that the inflation…
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Pretty bad. I’m not referring to the war in Ukraine, or the surge in COVID infections, or supply chain disruptions, or the growing number of gun deaths in the U.S. I’m talking of course about the capital markets. The negative 21% performance of the S&P 500 during the six-month period ending on June 30th ranks…
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It must be really tough to be an economist right now. Ordinarily the data that feeds into their economic models is consistent enough to enable them to forecast economic downturns with better than 50% accuracy (although they almost never get the timing or the severity right). Today, though, it’s a different story. Economists are flatly…
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