Savings Rates Decline You don’t hear much about America’s personal savings rate these days, and the reason may be because the news is discouraging: collectively, the percentage of our income that we save is trending downward again, and may be about to hit record lows. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis tracks the U.S. […]
2017 Third Quarter Report The last few years of a bull market are always a bit of a mystery to professional investors; the market rises faster than it did in the early, cautious years when nobody believed there WAS a bull market, even though there appear to be fewer fundamental or economic reasons for […]
So far, the world markets seem to be shrugging off the sabre-rattling coming from North Korea (normal behavior) and the U.S. White House (complete departure from policy). The smart money is betting that the distant but suddenly headline-grabbing possibility of the first conflict between two countries armed with nuclear weapons will amount to a tempest […]
They say a picture speaks a thousand words, and that means, to an economist, that sometimes it’s easier to communicate something complicated with a chart or a graph rather than a lot of explanatory text. So it is with three charts and a picture, selected for the eye-opening perspective they offer. The first, in the […]
Have you ever wondered what stock market professionals and equity analysts talk about in their spare time? Recently, the Bloomberg website featured a debate about something that is getting a lot of attention recently: the historically high, and still-rising U.S. stock market valuations. People have been willing to pay more, and more, and more for […]
Chances are, the market barometer you most often hear about is the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Every evening, the Dow’s ups or downs are soberly reported as if they reflect something important. They don’t. A recent online article noted that the 37-year-old index only reflects the performance of 30 U.S. multinational companies, and it doesn’t […]
What does it mean when your portfolio is up 10%? You receive portfolio performance reports every three months—a form of transparency that financial planning professionals introduced at a time when the typical brokerage statement was impossible to decipher. But it might surprise you to know that most professionals think there is actually little value to […]
Chances are you’ve never paid anybody to have lunch with you, but chances are you aren’t Warren Buffett either. Every year, the Sage from Omaha hosts an auction, with the highest bidder getting to join Buffett for lunch and bring seven guests—with the proceeds going to charity. The winner in this, the 18th year of […]
Friday, June 9 quietly marked/will mark an historic day in the financial services world. On that date, all financial advisors will be required to forego any sales agenda and give advice that would benefit their clients or customers—or, if they decide otherwise, to explain how and why they intend to give advice that instead primarily […]
If you have a good long memory, you may recall that last Summer, the U.K. panicked the investment markets by voting, in a nation-wide referendum, to exit the European Union. There were, of course, dire predictions about the impact on the U.K. economy, which never materialized, in large part because the U.K. had not yet […]
