June 8, 2023 It’s called the Fallacy of the Broken Window. It was first put forth by a 19th century economist named Fredric Bastiat. The main thesis of his argument was that going to war and blowing stuff up doesn’t create economic growth. Here’s the gist… A young boy breaks a business owner’s shop window. …
June 6, 2023 It was a real nail biter… Came right down to the wire… An eleventh hour save… There’s another saying that I’m sure is hanging as a motivational poster in the Congress cafeteria somewhere… Throw out whatever cliches you want but… Disaster averted. In a battle that was marked out since the beginning …
June 01, 2023 While the government is resolutely determined to set the residential real estate market up to fail by enticing people to buy houses they cannot afford, there’s another branch of the real estate market that’s also starting to feel some pain. And the main players who are going to feel the pain in …
May 30, 2023 Nowhere has the impact of soaring interest rates been felt more than in the residential real estate market. This past month’s economic reports from areas of the housing sector put the chaos on stark display. → Mortgage rates are at or near 20 year highs while mortgage application rates are, not surprisingly, …
May 26, 2023 There’s no denying that things have gotten weird where the culture landscape goes. This is a financial letter so I try to stick to topics of that nature. I don’t judge people’s personal beliefs. And I don’t want to make this about social issues per se… but the overlap between finance and …
May 25, 2023 It’s iconic… But generally meaningless these days. It was once THE barometer of economic health in the United States. Today, like an aging patriarch it’s given a certain level of respect — it gets noted in the business news almost every day — but its actual usefulness has diminished substantially. Still it …
May 23, 2023 Smart (and successful) investors are able to do two things… First, they do not put an immense amount of trust in government economic reports. I’m not going full “conspiracy theory” here, but there are extrapolations, adjustments, revisions and all kinds of other statistical tweaks that go into calculating the numbers. No reports …
May 19, 2023 Have consumers finally gone full walking dead? Last December I wrote about the rise of “zombie consumers” in today’s economy. How shrinking personal savings — thanks to depleted stimulus windfalls, falling real wages and “still-not-transitory” inflation — was impacting both consumers and threatening the economy as a whole. Given certain recent reports, I …
“Zombie Consumers” Are Clinging to Life (and Prepping for the Worst…) Read More »
May 18, 2023 What’s the best investment when times are tough? Morningstar asked that question in an article last week. They asked it because: …surging interest rates have given rise to another worry: Could the Fed overshoot on interest rates, pushing the economy into a recession along the way? To answer it, they did a …
May 16, 2023 Winning! Jay Powell likes to keep talking about that when he’s trying to explain that the economy isn’t headed for the big belly landing. Here’s what he said in his latest FOMC statement: The labor market remains very tight. Over the first three months of the year, job gains averaged 345 thousand …
