The U.S. Treasury bond yield curve is in the news again after briefly turning negative earlier this month. The financial media is trumpeting this event as an indicator that a recession will likely follow with a concomitant stock market decline. I suggest that this indicator is not useful in predicting either one. The yield curve…
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After living through one inconceivable event with worldwide repercussions (the COVID-19 pandemic), we now find ourselves facing another that was certainly on no one’s radar prior to 2022. How will Russia’s invasion of Ukraine impact the spending power of our dollars as well as the value of our savings in the capital markets? I had…
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I came across some data from the Federal Reserve that compares the ownership of assets in the U.S. by wealth percentile (the top 1%, the next 10%, the next 40%, and the remaining 50%). To add some flavor we’ll name these cohorts the Elite, the Successful, the Middle Class, and the Working Poor. Here’s a…
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The recession that began in February 2020 as a result of the COVID pandemic officially ended in April 2020 according to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a private nonpartisan economic research organization. (From the vantage point of 2021 this should come as no surprise). That makes the two-month COVID recession the shortest in…
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Inflation is in the news again after a long hiatus. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported in May that the broad inflation rate rose 4.2% over the past 12 months, the largest increase since 2008. Exactly what is inflation, and how does it impact investments? Simply put, inflation (and its negative twin deflation) is…
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