October 06, 2016

Healthcare and Global Demand Growth Around the world, rising living standards are driving global demand growth for goods and services.  We have often written about the rise of new global middle classes as linchpins of this growth – particularly the nascent middle classes of China and India.  The rise of Read more

April 28, 2016

Market Summary A year ago, in our letter of April 30, 2015, we noted: “While we do not see a crisis as imminent, we believe that a global debt liquidation is becoming a more obvious eventuality sometime in the next two to three years.” Since then we have continued to Read more

April 01, 2016

When Too Much News Can Confuse 1.  GDP grew by 2.4 percent in 2015 — ignore flawed data, including GDPNow. Fourth-quarter 2015 GDP growth for the U.S. was just revised up to 1.4 percent annualized from an initial reading of 0.7 percent.  That brings growth for the year as a Read more

March 11, 2016

No, Chicken Little, the sky ain’t falling Data continue to come in showing that fears of a U.S. recession are groundless — good GDP growth, good job growth, continued improvement in labor force participation, improvement in “underemployment” (when workers want full-time work and can’t find it), and the increasing signs Read more

March 04, 2016

China Stocks Deserve A Look    There were no fireworks at last week’s China summit of the finance ministers and central bankers of the world’s 20 biggest economies; it was a tame and mostly uneventful affair.  Most significantly, China assured the participants that their economic growth strategy doesn’t hinge on Read more

February 19, 2016

Market Summary  Some market sectors have become very good values.  Others need to fall more in price to become attractive.  Seeing the outsized declines in energy, technology, and other sectors has made us quite certain that some values have been attained in certain sectors.  We are focused on technology, social Read more

January 22, 2016

How Fast Will the Fed Raise Rates? The “dot plot” of the Federal Reserve shows how the opinions of various FOMC participants stack up, and is published after each meeting.  December’s dot plot suggests that the majority is anticipating four rate increases in 2016, ending the year with the Fed Read more

January 15, 2016

China:  Investor Confusion Leading to Volatility  According to Jonathan Anderson of Emerging Advisors Group (EM Advisor Group), who is our favorite China economic analyst, his “base case” for China has shifted.  Regular readers know that we have followed Mr. Anderson for many years, and that in our view he has Read more

September 04, 2015

China Is Not Crashing Panic over Chinese stock markets and the Chinese economy is irrational. There has been no historical correlation between the Chinese stock market and the Chinese economy, and there is no indication that the Chinese economy is crashing. In China, we see a maturing economy navigating a Read more