From Wallets to Wall Street: Why We Hate Inflation Why is inflation widely unpopular among the public? Inflation erodes the value of money. Inflation introduces uncertainty about future prices, making it harder for households to plan budgets, save for long-term…
US Exceptionalism Discussions of U.S. exceptionalism in the stock market stem from the consistent outperformance of major U.S. indexes compared to global markets. For example, over the past decade, the Global Dow is up about 103%, while the S&P 500…
Debbie Downer On Friday, the University of Michigan reported that the Consumer Sentiment Index for the U.S. fell to the second-lowest reading on record, with the mid-May level falling to 50.8 from April’s 52.2. “Tariffs were spontaneously mentioned by nearly…
Team Wait and See Virtually no one was surprised when the Federal Reserve kept its key lending rate, the fed funds rate, at 4.25 – 4.50% last week. Fed officials had widely telegraphed that there would be no change in…
Front-Running Tariffs Distort GDP The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) reported that first quarter Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which is the broadest measure of economic activity, fell at an annualized pace of 0.3%. Yet, a closer look reveals that…
Trading on Headlines The graphic below chronicles trading in the S&P 500 Index following the late-day announcement on April 2, referred to as “Liberation Day” by the president, regarding reciprocal tariffs. What’s behind last week’s choppy action? Early in the…
Flexing Economic Muscles As we approached the early April selloff, much of the data suggested that economic activity was expanding. Let’s examine two important pieces of data. Led by a 5.3% surge in auto sales, retail sales rose a strong…
Stocks End Volatile Week Higher but Certainty in Short Supply On Wednesday, President Trump put reciprocal tariffs on hold for 90 days (except China), fueling the third-best daily gain (9.5%) in the S&P 500 Index since WWII, according to Bloomberg.…
Tariff Talk Leads to a Market Correction “Here’s the interesting thing about the stock market: …It has no gender, ethnicity, or religion… “It’s the ultimate voting machine, reflecting prospects for earnings growth, stability, liquidity, inflation, taxation, and predictable rule of…
Manufacturing in Crisis Over the past month, we have approached the issue of tariffs from the market's perspective, specifically that of investors. Let’s take a different approach today. We’ll examine the issue from the perspective of domestic manufacturers and manufacturing…
