The U.S. Most large U.S. indices have pushed to new all-time highs, on the back of optimism stoked by positive earnings (as we have have been anticipating over the past few weeks) and perhaps because of optimism about U.S./China trade negotiations. We see that negotiation process continuing to play out, Read more
Two and a half years ago, University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler won the Nobel Prize for his foundational work in creating the discipline now known as behavioral economics, from which we have gotten the field of behavioral finance. We described one of Thaler’s main discoveries: “Humans are not immune Read more
Many investors are cycle-watchers. The cycles they watch vary greatly and encompass the whole spectrum of economic, financial, political, and geopolitical events and trends. Some are brief, some are long, and some (such as the Kondratiev wave cycle) attempt to frame and track historical epochs. We do not assign decisive Read more
Perceived recession risks continue to tick down, after reaching a flurry over the summer. Morgan Stanley’s recession risk model continues to register lows for the year. Source: Morgan Stanley Research They comment: “Parts of the economy are responding well to the sharp drop in interest rates since January, an indication Read more
Recession fears have been on the rise in the U.S., and here’s one way to quantify that trend. Below is a chart showing Google News search trends for the topic of “recession.” On a 1-to-100 scale, it hit its peak in early January, 2008, just after the Great Recession had Read more
The U.S. Earnings season in the U.S. is in full swing. While earnings growth has stalled after the tax-break driven pace of growth that was enjoyed in 2018, it remains broadly within the trend of growth that has followed the 2008/2009 financial crisis. Source: Bloomberg, LLP Of course, there Read more
Executive Summary 1. Trade wars, geopolitics, and the fate of the yuan. Beneath the trade-war back-and-forth is a stark reality: the era of Chinas massive accumulation of foreign exchange reserves is ending, and in coming years, Chinas currency is likely headed for a significant decline. Saber rattling goes on as Read more
Personal Income Is Up, Which Correlates With A Stock-Market Rally The health of the consumer is one of the key drivers of the U.S. economy, given the preeminent importance of consumer demand (and of course, this is a feature of all developed economies, not just of the U.S.). Real personal Read more
Executive Summary 1. The Trump administration deepens its drive for transparent healthcare pricing. In February, the Trump administration asked for comments on a proposed rule with potentially vast effects on the entire U.S. healthcare sector. A rule that came into effect in January already required hospitals to make their list Read more
Last year, MSCI — the company that constructs the indexes underlying many major ETFs and benchmarks — began to incorporate some domestically traded Chinese stocks into those indexes. These stocks, called “A shares” to distinguish them from other classes of Chinese shares that trade on exchanges outside the mainland, had Read more
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