FLGV News and Press, Franklin Liberty U.S. Treasury Bond From 02/23/21

While November 10 represented Pfizer's "stunning" vaccine announcement, it was also around that time jobless claims bottomed out therefore rising economic retrenchment risks. In early January, reflation was given another boost, allegedly, by the results of the Georgia Senate elections...

Last March was when Modern Monetary Theory was launched in Washington DC. The CARES Act provided $2 trillion of financial aid. As a result, the U.S. budget deficit mushroomed to $3.5 trillion in Fiscal 2020 - triple the previous record - while the Fed's holdings of U.S. Treasury secur...

After another Fed-induced yield curve inversion in August of 2019, the economy dipped into a recession at the end of 2020. Certainly, the pandemic shutdown contributed to the recession, but possibly the economy was headed in that direction anyway following the yield curve inversion. ...

In August 2020, the Congressional Budget Office projected a wide 6.6 percentage point gulf between actual and potential GDP in 2020. The CBO also in August 2020, projected that the output gap would persist for the entire decade. The latest February 2021 CBO projection now shows th...

Despite low yields, bonds can continue to diversify risk in broad portfolios. Although the stock-bond correlation has been weak in recent decades, fixed income returns have been positive in nearly all recessions since 1952, even in periods when stock-bond correlations were positive. ...

Inflation is going to remain relatively well-bounded. We will see a cyclical uptick in inflation this year. But from a longer-term perspective, there isn’t a meaningful risk of inflation breaking out significantly to the upside. Fiscal and monetary support are clearly two aspec...

Economic growth is returning to almost every country in the world, and almost all commodity prices are rising. The thing to worry about is the direction of fiscal policy, which will almost certainly bring us higher taxes, increased regulatory burdens, and more expensive energy. Fo...

When the economy overheats, central banks try to calm it down; when it's depressed, they try to prop it up, as they are doing at the moment. We are experiencing the most aggressive intervention in the economy and financial markets by the Fed and the US Treasury, which is why stocks ar...

Economist Ed Yardeni pointed out last week that the money supply has exploded and "M2 is off the charts." Essentially, when this much money is sloshing around, it tends to get spent, especially as uncertainty comes to an end and the economic outlook seems brighter. The Labor Depar...

Washington appears to be back at the center of the market’s attention as Congress moves to pass yet another fiscal package. For the moment, inflation is in check (prices as measured by the CPI rose about 1.5% year over year in January, a touch lower than the pre-COVID rate), bu...