BIBL News and Press, Inspire 100 From 09/12/21

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said that the government will run out of money by the middle of October, sooner than expected, and that Congress needs to act pronto. With all the hyped-up performative bloviating about the debt ceiling, it’s easy to forget that raising the debt ...

We stay tactically overweight European equities with two key events on the horizon: a European Central Bank meeting and the German election. U.S. jobs growth in August was far below expectations. Yet, we caution that seasonality could be at play and a revision upwards is possible. ...

Today's release of the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) shows the demand for employees continues to grow. The July report shows openings increased 749,000 to a record for the Survey of 10.9 million open positions. Clearly, openings far outpace those looking for a job...

The missing, but long-overdue correction in stocks is probably a factor of the relentless pumping of electronic dollars into the financial system at a rate of $120 billion per month, causing the Fed balance sheet to rise to $8.349 trillion at last count. Suppressing bond market volati...

Despite the lowball jobs total on Friday, plenty of good news is buried in the small print, like massive revisions to the previous two months. In addition, Hurricane Ida may have suppressed reporting of August payroll data. There are some more clues in the ADP reported last Wednesday,...

The undershoot in nonfarm payroll employment in August is noticeable, with a flattening in high-contact services employment growth. Employment from the household survey rose faster (twice as fast in August), but not enough to change the picture dramatically. Goods production emplo...

We should question the inevitability of future events occurring exactly as people and the numbers foretell, as uncertainty changes as we mature into risk. Whether we like it or not, we become risk assumers or, hopefully, risk managers. My philosophy of life and investing is based on a...

The economic slowdown we’ve been writing about for months officially arrived last Friday in the form of a particularly weak employment report. But the US economy did still add 235,000 jobs in August. The economic recovery is still intact, even if at a reduced rate of change. ...

Strategas chief economist Don Rissmiller discusses the recent hit to consumer confidence and Covid-19’s longer-term ramifications for the labor market and worker productivity. We had a strong first half, so it’s not surprising to see consumer spending come down a bit fro...

We’re starting the post-Labor Day period with the S&P 500 sitting comfortably with a 20 percent year-to-date gain, with the tech-laden Nasdaq Composite nipping at its heels and making up for the big performance gap with value stocks earlier in the year. Earnings per share f...