Every year since 1975, the Social Security Administration has automatically adjusted its benefit payments upward to account for inflation; the goal is for the payments to keep pace with the cost of living that recipients are experiencing. For the past decade, these inflation adjustments have been pretty modest, as you can see in the chart. [...]
Arguably the wildest consequence of the recent pandemic is the remarkable price boom in the U.S. housing market—which, some might remember, went spectacularly bust in the 2008-9 Great Recession collapse. Today, half of all houses put on the market are purchased in less than a week, often for more than the asking price. One recent [...]
Inflation is in the news again, thanks to a recent jump in the Consumer Price Index. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has calculated that the price of a basket of goods and services rose 5% on an annualized basis in May, the largest increase since August of 2008. The inflation rate was 4.2% in April—which, [...]
You probably know that the U.S. stock market has been delivering the highest returns among all developed nations, not just in the last couple of years but over the most recent ten years. But that also means that U.S. stocks have become much more expensive relative to other nations. How much more? One of the [...]
While nature offers four seasons, Wall Street offers only one—four times a year. It’s called “earnings season,” and it can move the markets. So what is earnings season and why is it important? Earnings season is the month of the year that follows each calendar quarter-end month (January, April, July and October) in which many [...]
We are definitely living in strange times, with a year of pandemic, microscopically low interest rates, a soaring stock market and everybody walking around looking like bank robbers. And so there were bound to be odd distortions in different sectors of the economy. One of the most interesting is found in the U.S. housing market, [...]
One of the most common educational props in the financial planning world is something known as the Callan Periodic Table of Investment Returns. The table is constructed in various ways—either with annual returns, or monthly returns—but the result for those shorter time periods is always the same and vividly illustrated. As you can see from [...]
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Conventional economics tells us something that would seem to be obvious: when the government creates more money, there is more money available to buy things, and therefore the prices of things rise—and we get inflation. For some reason, this logical sequence of events seems not to be happening today. The amount of money in the [...]
The financial media took a brief break from predicting everything that will happen in 2021 (don’t laugh; it’s their yearly habit) to bring us the engaging story of how masses of small amateur investors managed to bid the share prices of three largely-unprofitable companies—GameStop, AMC Entertainment Holdings and Blackberry—up nearly 1,000 percent, collectively. GameStop's stock [...]
