If a tree falls in the forest, but no one cares because: the whole forest is on fire, does it make a sound? The answer is a definitive “no”, judging by how the second quarter GDP number was received this week. The number was stark – a 9.5% contraction in economic activity from the first […]
The fastest bear market on record, followed by the best* quarter in 20 years, and a decade’s worth of economic and societal change, compressed into a just few months. We’re half way through the year, and what a remarkable and surreal ride it has been. We’ve certainly come a long way from the depth of […]
The stock market is not the economy. We all know it. We all say it. But it is one thing to say it, and quite another to live through it. There were moments during the past few weeks, as I watched the market rack up successive gains amidst a wave of anguish and anger sweeping […]
The disconnect between the front page headlines and the markets section, was on striking display this week as the protests following the reprehensible killing of George Floyd continued to sweep the country. Amid a pandemic and a self-imposed economic recession, our nation certainly didn’t need a national crisis. We didn’t need burning police cars, destruction […]
A procession of luminary fund managers made the media rounds earlier this week, each one sounding alarm bells over what they see is an overvalued stock market, completely “divorced from the economy”. The media appearances coincided with two down days in the market, drawing a response from the President no less, who weighed in that […]
It is a strange and perplexing period to be in, where minutes, hours and days seem to fly by at warp speed, but the calendar barely budges. Hard to believe that it was only three weeks ago that the NBA suspended the season – the demarcation line that brought the severity of the health crisis […]
The news earlier this week was largely of the distressing and depressing kind, but one headline stood out – Sanna Marin, Finland’s 34-year-old prime minister is proposing a four-day workweek! European media was all over the story and evidently it made such a splash as to jump across the Atlantic. The same day it showed […]
Despite the well-rehearsed dance of CEOs providing earnings guidance to Wall Street analysts, only to beat the earnings estimates just so, every earnings quarter has its share of surprises. One constant: a retail or consumer company CEO blaming poor earnings on the weather. The season is irrelevant; too much rain, snow or sun are all […]
For much of the past few weeks, writing a financial headline has been a simple copy + paste job: Markets rally on hopes of a Fed rate cut after a disappointing < fill in the blank >economic report. In the near-term, such “bad news is good news” reaction is not perverse, nor is it particularly […]
This week, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) published its semiannual forecast for global economies, cutting the expected growth rate for 2019 from 3.7% (projected last October), to 3.3%. You can check off all the usual suspects for the tempered outlook: the slowdown in trade, tariffs, declining business confidence and increasing political uncertainty. Granted, a 3.3% […]