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In the never-ending, 24/7, polarizing political news cycle, headlines of Ukraine phone calls, China trade negotiations, impeachment hearings, presidential elections, Federal Reserve monetary policy, and other Washington based stories have traders and news junkies glued to their phones, Twitter...
Despite the ups and downs of the past two months, U.S. equity markets remain near all-time highs and have experienced surprisingly few bouts of broad market volatility this year, especially considering the very significant moves in other non-equity markets, a shift in central bank policy, and ...
Current market conditions and misplaced investor pessimism make this topic worth revisiting. Continued revisits will likely prove valuable as global events play out. The value of hindsight is that it reveals the likely basis of significant market shifts, the importance of which were not knowab...
“But as we cannot predict such external influences very well, the only reliable crystal ball is a probabilistic one.” - Benoit Mandelbrot The C-J Monte Carlo Simulation Model C-J is a Monte Carlo simulation model used to assess risk in the S&P 500. Traditional stock...
The Great Recession never ended. I say that because the deep economic flaws that caused it were never corrected. All recovery efforts since merely clouded our eyes to the problems growing larger around us, even making them worse, and now we are going back into the belly of the Great Recession....
If you block out the noise coming out of Washington, D.C., as most investors do, the fourth and final full week of September 2019 saw a lot of good news for the U.S. economy. Even the ever uber-pessimistic Tyler Durden grudgingly acknowledged as much before setting the stage for future doom:...
Saturday morning's reports on personal income and spending continue to show a consumer that is doing alright. Meanwhile, durable goods orders continue to show a production sector that is struggling. First, real personal income (red in the graph below) rose +0.4% in August, while real persona...
Non-Financial Debt (NFD) expanded $408 billion during Q1 to a record $53.015 trillion. This was down from Q1's $765 billion expansion. On a seasonally-adjusted and annualized (SAAR) basis, Q2 NFD growth slowed to $1.652 trillion from Q1's booming $3.061 trillion. The slowdown was chiefly expla...
The Growth Question The basic question about the US economy is, well, when's the growth going to stop? We know we've not beaten the existence of the business cycle. We know that at some point we're going to have a recession. The question is, well, when? Growth was slowing down in the earli...
Purpose I look at the high frequency weekly indicators because while they can be very noisy, they provide a good nowcast of the economy and will telegraph the maintenance or change in the economy well before monthly or quarterly data is available. They are also an excellent way to "mark yo...