Weekly Brief
Jerome Powell the Giant Slayer
Since late last year, Jerome Powell, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, has become the giant slayer attacking the formidable giant of hyper-inflation. His one goal is to bring this giant to his knees and slow its impact on society. His primary strategy is suffocating...
Perspectives
Consumer perspectives of the economy are very dire. In fact, last week, consumer sentiment on their near-term view of their financial conditions dropped to the lowest level since the 1940s when the University of Michigan began taking this survey. The University of...
Investing During a Recession
In 2021, everyone was a professional investor. Uber drivers had hot stock tips; anonymous Twitter profiles dolled out crypto takes, chants of "stocks only go up" reverberated through high school hallways, meme stocks became a thing, etc. Unfortunately, I couldn't...
Identifying Market Bottoms
Worknik has a good description of a contrarian. They define a contrarian as: 1. Noun: One who takes a contrary view or action, especially an investor who makes decisions that contradict prevailing wisdom, as in buying securities that are unpopular at the time. 2....
Lemonade from Lemons
The Saigon 1965 new Armed Forces Radio Service DJ, played by Robin Williams in Good Morning Vietnam, would be right in place today as a stock market commentator. “Gooood Morrrning CNBC! Today’s stock market forecast is hot and s%#tty! Tomorrow probably more hot and...
New Market Lows, Buffet Buys
More negative news was released last week by the University of Michigan of their consumer’s sentiment report. Consumers are getting discouraged despite strong employment and continued wage growth matching inflation. The report indicated consumer sentiment fell to 59.1...
US Productivity Plummets
Headline news tomorrow will be today’s Nonfarm Labor Productivity report released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The news is the announcement of the greatest annualized decline in labor productivity in the US since the third quarter of 1947! Annualized...
Recession Worries?
When searching “Recession Worries for 2022” Google responded with 128,000,000 articles I could read. Evidently, there are a lot of people writing about the new risks of a recession after 2020’s three-month technical recession. One favorite is CNN’s April 26 article on...
Cooling Housing Market
For those of you who own or have piloted a boat, know that when you bring the throttle back, the boat doesn’t stop right away. Depending on how fast you are going, it might take several minutes before you come to a complete stop. The bigger the boat the longer it...
Are Bonds Still a Good Investment?
I read this quote today from personal finance author Ramit Sethi that I thought was spot on, "the way people feel about money is highly uncorrelated with the amount in their bank account." When it comes to retirement, people are primarily worried about one thing,...
Separating Global Economy
T he world economy has always had a variance in the speed at which countries were growing or contracting in any given year. The growth of each country would be ahead or behind the global average based on their unique circumstances that would, including demand for...
Life Assessments and Feelings
The modern car is so complex that the former process of opening the hood to figure out what is wrong is a complete exercise in futility. This, of course, does not stop the modern male who will still pull over and open the hood, apparently believing he can spot and...
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