Agustin Carstens, the General Manager of the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), spoke in Geneva a week ago — offering some soul-searching reflection on how the world’s financial authorities got the inflation story so terribly wrong. (The Bank of International Settlements is essentially “the central bank of central banks.”) We Read more
We say it often and we will say it again: earnings are the mother’s milk of stock prices. On a market-wide basis, a flat or declining earnings trend almost invariably accompanies a flat or declining trend in stock prices. This doesn’t mean that investors should go completely to cash (particularly Read more
Interest Rates, Inflation, and the Fed’s Coming Gut Check This morning’s CPI print hit 7.5% year-over-year, up 0.6% from the previous print, and slightly worse than expected. Some (not us) had believed that December’s number would be a peak; it was not. Given trajectories of energy and housing costs, February Read more
This past weekend we were invited to present our views on the current investment landscape to the local chapter of the American Association of Individual Investors (AAII). As our title indicates, there are many macro factors at work, all of them of fundamental interest to investors. How do we rank Read more
We started banging the drum on inflation early this year; over the course of the year, more analysts and observers began to join us in identifying the rising risk of more troublesome and persistent inflation. By late summer, the consensus had firmly shifted to the “persistent” camp, but the Federal Read more
As many states have now ended the additional pandemic unemployment benefits provided by the Federal government, we are seeing in real time that those benefits were in fact serving to suppress employment and encourage workers to stay home; unemployment is falling faster there than in states that have maintained the Read more
Last week, we noted that the typical 60/40 stock/bond portfolio allocation that has become an investing commonplace in the past several decades has historically produced many “lost decades” — periods of ten years or more that saw little to no advance in the portfolio’s real value. Source: GMO Capital Of Read more
The current investment environment suggests one critical lesson to us: the future into which we are moving is going to be very different from the immediate past. Therefore, investment strategies which have become standard-issue conventional wisdom over the past few decades are going to fail. Investors will have to reach Read more
April inflation data came in hot, as we’ve been predicting for months. By bringing you our Guild Basic Needs Index, we have been preparing you for some of the eye-popping numbers you will see. Year-over-year, lapping last year’s first full month of pandemic lockdowns, prices rose 4.2%. But month-over-month, overall Read more
Reading time: 3 minutes Emerging markets, like the rest of global stock markets, have enjoyed a torrid rise since the pandemic bottom just over a year ago. That rise was reinvigorated in late October and early November as word filtered into markets that covid vaccines had proven effective in accelerated Read more
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