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Global public opinion seems divided on whether or not to impose a “carbon tax” on the metal and mining sector. This goes double for steel. Steel serves as one of the most widely-used building materials in the world. The process depends upon coking coal. Steel produce...
How similar will the next three or five years look from the years that immediately preceded the pandemic? And what are the implications for us as global equity investors? We don’t expect anything like the hyperinflation and stagflation we experienced in the 1970s; our outlook s...
The influence of energy prices is always a significant input for consumer inflation, and that’s certainly been true recently. The spike in oil has eased in recent months, which implies that headline CPI will decline in the months ahead. It’s also possible that energy...
Plunges in sentiment like we are seeing right now only go this far during a recession. People don’t need the government to tell them we are in a recession to start feeling like we are in a recession. The unprecedented mountain of consumer debt leaves us far less resilient to wi...
The economic news emanating from Britain and the European Union is continuing to come in weak, as many European countries are expected to slip into a recession this year. While inflation may be ebbing in China and the U.S., inflation is still accelerating in Britain and the rest of Eu...
The war in Ukraine clearly triggered the spike in oil prices and in agricultural prices as well. Inflation, interest rates and Fed policy are linked. Similarly, supply chain disruptions, the slowdown in China, and big-tech reversals are all Covid-related. The bottom line right now...
According to the federal funds futures market, market participants expect the Fed to raise short-term rates to about 3% by early 2023 and then take a pause. The fiscal stimulus is not being repeated and the Fed has just commenced to shrink its balance sheet, which means it will no lon...
Our rising price problem is, more than anything, a supply problem, and reducing demand is certainly one way to tackle it. But returning to the pre-COVID growth rate doesn’t mean we are headed to recession, that contraction is in our immediate future. US stocks and REITs wer...
Now is not the time to plan. This is the time to execute the plan. The plan started months ago in the case of stocks but years ago in the case of our bond holdings. We have been warning about inflation and have been adding to our core oil and gold holdings since late 2020. They have b...
In the US, we may have seen the peak of overall inflation, with the annualized CPI rate increasing at 8.3% in April, down from 8.5% in March. One particular item has gotten recently in the US, baby formula, a peculiarly egregious shortage. It is the food situation that is the most...