Housing is by far the biggest expense for most American households. Any inflation analysis that ignores housing misses not only the elephant in the room, but the room itself.
The market, and maybe all of us, would like to believe the latest 3% annual CPI number was a harbinger of ever-lower inflation, and we are on the road to 2% inflation by year end. I would argue, “Not so fast.” Inflation is far from dead, and CPI will likely go slightly up between now and the end of the year.
Yesterday, we got a 3.0% inflation reading, which was a touch below expectations. Markets responded about as you might expect.
One of the hardest parts of economic forecasting is separating what we expect from what we want.
Central bankers think they can handle a situation and fire the artillery. It always has an effect… but ultimately it is rarely the effect they wanted. Doing nothing at all might have been better but that wasn’t an option. They’re trapped in an endless spiral of intervention.
A month or two ago, people were having a conniption about commercial real estate. An absolute meltdown.
Is recession still coming? Of course. But some funny things are happening on the way there.
I was watching NBC Nightly News the other night, and they ran a story about how there is no housing inventory because people are trapped in their mortgages.
A year ago, the US Consumer Price Index was rising at an almost 9% annual rate. The Federal Reserve was trying to change that trend with tighter policy. But it wasn’t just the Fed. All of us—businesses, consumers, everyone—responded to the pain.
Wall Street is a strange place. In 2017, the top Wall Street banks published over 40,000 pieces of research… every week. Yet investors read less than 1% of that, according to Quinlan & Associates.
In economics we often talk about cycles. “Business cycle theory” is an entire academic sub-field whose basic idea is that economic history really does repeat itself. Not in every detail, of course, but as a recurring sequence of expansions and recessions.
Nvidia’s (NVDA) management team is sending a signal to the market.
“Crisis” is an overused word. Actual crises are those rare times when we are on the knife edge of disaster. It’s not a crisis when a bank fails, or Congress can’t agree on a budget. Those are annoyances (unless it's your bank). While not good, they don’t spell immediate catastrophe.
The private equity (PE) industry has been all the rage over the past 10 years.
Swiss money manager Felix Zulauf is a crowd favorite at SIC. His 2022 presentation was right on target, so I asked him back to tell us what he expects for the rest of 2023 and beyond. Unfortunately, he thinks a slowdown is coming that will hit markets hard.
I was a math major in college. My favorite class was Probability and Statistics, taught by Dr. Wolcin. He warned us from the beginning that the final exam was the grandaddy of final exams—that it was really hard, and he would probably end up curving it.
According to Buffett, the US economy just went through the “most extraordinary economic period since World War II.” That’s a heck of a statement.
We often talk about technology’s influence on the economy. After the Strategic Investment Conference, though, I’ve decided that isn’t strong enough. It’s more correct to say technology is the economy.
I once had a cat who liked movies. His name was Otto—he passed away in 2014 at 15 years old. His favorite movie was The Matrix because there’s lots of action and explosions. All the action on the screen could hold his attention.
The economy co-exists and interacts with broader society, including government. Public policies—and the political processes that determine them—can change the economy in deep and lasting ways. We may not like them, but we can’t ignore them.
We are presented with this decision in finance a lot. There is a small probability of something bad happening and a large probability that everything will be fine. What do you do to insure yourself against something bad happening? Because there is no such thing as a free lunch.
World economic growth is slowing. That’s so obvious, very few will disagree. I suppose there are people out there predicting imminent 1990s-like expansion, but they are few and far between. If recession begins soon, it will be the most anticipated one in history.
I want to write a bit about artificial intelligence from the standpoint of a market person who knows little about technology.
Next week also brings what could be a pivotal Federal Reserve policy meeting. We use this word “pivotal” to say an event is important. Taken literally, it means to turn in a different direction than you were previously going.
A few months ago, the internet was filling up with predictions that we’d have a 2008-style crash in home prices. The thinking was that the increase in interest rates would cause mortgage payments to skyrocket and price out an entire generation of homebuyers.
Back before clocks went digital, you could say “a stopped clock is right twice a day” and even youngsters would know what you meant. A mechanism could be nonfunctional but occasionally correct.
When I worked on Wall Street, it was the golden age of hedge funds. They were on the bleeding edge of finance in the mid-2000s, swashbuckling market pirates who did all kinds of exotic stuff to earn alpha for their investors.
Spotting trend changes is the key to economic forecasting. They don’t happen often. Most of the time, this year will be similar to last year. The pace varies but the overall trend continues… until it doesn’t.
Yesterday’s CPI report showed that inflation continues to slow to 5% on an annualized basis. That is a lot better than it was last year. We should be happy about this.
“Thinking the Unthinkable.” What does that phrase bring to mind? To me it suggests a situation that has become so stressed you are forced to consider undesirable solutions.
Remember when banks were small? Those old enough to have a bank account in the 1970s should. Back then, most people did their banking with a locally owned institution, often the First National Bank of (Your Town).
Recently I saw someone share a clip from their weather app. It said, “Rain expected at 3 pm,” right above a little graphic showing a 30% chance of rain at 3 pm. What’s wrong with that picture?
For years I’ve used a sandpile metaphor to describe complex systems like banking. Keep dropping grains of sand long enough and you will eventually trigger an avalanche.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, this will be the “longest” letter I’ve sent you in a while, as there are quite a few pictures. It may also be the most wide-ranging.
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said the Fed could hike rates more and more often.
If you read and pay attention to the world, you probably know the recent past pretty well. And if you’re a history buff like me, you also know something about the more distant past.
Last week, I spoke at the Mississippi CFA Society’s annual forecasting event.
Debt isn’t forever but can definitely seem like it. That feeling is a clue you have too much debt. Wisely used, debt helps build income-generating assets that pay for themselves. The payments are manageable because you’re also getting something else of value.
Federal Reserve officials like to call their decisions “data dependent.” Business leaders say it a little differently, often “data driven.” The point, in both cases, is something like: “We consider relevant data when making important decisions.”
Assumptions can be wise or unwise. They can be unduly optimistic or excessively pessimistic. Slightly different assumptions can produce giant changes in predicted outcomes. Assumptions are necessary but we shouldn’t make them lightly, nor forget we are making them.
These weekly letters, of which I’ve now written well over 1,000 (plus 7 books and multiple papers and articles), are generally about two broad topics: the economy and the financial markets. While related, these aren’t the same. Good news for one can be (and often is) bad news for the other.
In stock investing there’s a management style called “growth at a reasonable price” or GARP. It seeks to achieve steadier results by avoiding both expensive growth stocks and beaten-down value stocks.
The world’s leading CEOs, politicians, and various do-gooders were in Davos, Switzerland, this week, discussing ways to solve our collective problems and create opportunities for their own companies. The most important conversations were off the record and many of the public speeches were simply performance art.
The Federal Open Market Committee’s 12 voting members differ on where they think interest rates should go this year. But we know they’re unanimously against cutting rates until at least 2024—or at least they were as of December, according to that meeting’s minutes.
Welcome to 2023. It’s Forecast Season on Wall Street, the time when everyone tells us what to expect for the new year. Do they really know? Of course not. Forecasters don’t know, investors know they don’t know, yet we all go through this exercise anyway.
This is my least favorite time of the year.
This will be my last letter of 2022. I want to use this letter as a set-up for my annual forecast issue the first week of January. That means we will touch on a variety of topics, kind of a snapshot into where my mind is today. Get ready to travel the world but let’s start at home with the Federal Reserve meeting this week.
There’s a lot of chatter out there about recession…
Economic news—and market reactions to it—increasingly resemble a tennis game. Spectators follow the ball back and forth, thinking something will happen but usually it doesn’t.
Change is constant, in the economy and everything else. We talk about it often. Yet when we talk about the economy changing, we usually mean the economy’s condition is changing—from expansion to recession, deflationary to inflationary, emerging to developing, etc. That’s different from changes in the economy’s actual structure.
