We’re Saving More Than We Realized Quick: What’s America’s national savings rate? A generation ago, you might have guessed 10% and been pretty close to the market. More recently, there has been a lot of hand-wringing about a precipitous decline in how much of their income Americans are saving—down, according to the U.S. government’s Bureau […]
Crisis Continued We should probably all be celebrating the news that, after eight years of headlines predicting the worst sort of gloom and doom, the nation of Greece has emerged from its bailout program. Over that time period, the country received 289 billion euros ($330 billion) from the International Monetary Fund, the European Union and […]
The Growth Spike Recent reports about the U.S. economy were a case of good news and bad news. The good news is that, in the second three months of the year, the U.S. economy grew at an estimated 4.1%—better than the 2.2% growth posted during 2018’s first quarter. The 4.1% figure is subject to revision […]
What to Make of the “Trade War” Last week, there was finally some evidence that the investment markets were starting to get jittery about the escalating tit-for-tat tariffs and threats of tariffs that some economists are calling “America vs. the World.” Most investors are probably wondering whether new taxes on items flowing into and out […]
Stealthy Bears You’ve no doubt read that we are experiencing the second-longest bull market since World War II, which started in March of 2009 and has continued without a bear market (defined as a decline of 20%) since. But is that true? Several recent articles have pointed out that we did, indeed, experience a “stealth” […]
Defaults Down the Road When it comes to municipal finances, we may have entered the calm before the storm. You can go to the MuniNet Guide, which describes itself as the “hub for state, local and municipal research,” and find detailed historical statistics on the bankruptcies of small municipal utilities and special purpose districts, cities, […]
Churning at the Top Index investing is boring, right? This seems especially true with the large cap indexes like the S&P 500, which includes big permanent, stable titans of the global economy. Not much changes from year to year, decade to decade. Or does it? In actual fact, the S&P 500 added and deleted three […]
Flattening Curve The best indicator of a future recession is not perfect, and doesn’t provide an exact time or date, but economists have found that an inverted yield curve can be a warning sign of a downturn to come. A what? The yield curve is a map of the yield of bonds from very short […]
Perspective on Today’s Market Events It looks like the U.S. stock market will finally get something that happens, on average, about once a year: a 10+% percent drop—the definition of a market correction. The last time this happened was a whopper—the Great Recession drop that caused U.S. stocks to drop more than 50%–so most people […]
Downturn for What? On Tuesday morning, Wall Street traders woke up to something they haven’t experienced much of lately: actual market volatility. One trader posted an image of his Bloomberg terminal at the market opening (re-posted here), which showed an immediate scary-looking plunge in U.S. equities as the opening bell rung. By the end of […]
