President Trump last week placed the blame for crashing stock markets on the Federal Reserve and its decision to continue raising interest rates. The President thinks that’s crazy and wants the Fed to keep interest rates low to keep the economy humming along. And while Trump stated that he doesn’t want to fire Fed Chairman Jerome Powell, the public...
If weakness in the stock market earlier this year didn’t wake up investors and make them realize the underlying weak fundamentals of the US economy, hopefully last week’s stock market declines did. Just as much of the stock market’s growth over the past few years has been driven by tech stocks, so has much of the decline been driven...
The dream of every American is to retire comfortably and securely. After decades of working in an office, at a factory, or in a school or hospital, people want to be able to relax and enjoy their golden years in retirement, seeing the sights and having the experiences that they didn’t have time for while they were working. But...
Those of us who criticize the Federal Reserve’s conduct of monetary policy are often ignored and sidelined during boom times. We’re supposedly the ones who are crashing the party, harshing the market’s vibes, always predicting doom and gloom. Well, there’s a reason for that, and that’s because the Fed’s inflationary monetary policy will always end in a recession or...
For anyone hoping for a restoration of normal trade relations between China and the United States, last week’s Bloomberg report on Chinese government hardware hacking came as a devastating blow. If the allegations are true that Chinese spies managed covertly and surreptitiously to place microchips into servers used by Amazon, Apple, and other large American corporations, that will just...
While most investors know that past performance is no predictor of future performance, they nonetheless look at past performance as a potential indicator of the future. Particularly when you’re looking at mutual funds or index funds, judging fund managers on their ability to pick the right assets for a fund can be a very important part of doing your...
The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) voted last week to raise interest rates yet again, setting a target range this time of 2.00-2.25%. While that was expected by everyone and had been priced in already by markets, what took some people by surprise was the fact that the FOMC’s statement for the first time in years omitted the statement...
According to the latest estimates, stock buybacks will have reached an all-time high of $1 trillion this year. That’s a 46% increase from last year, and far higher than the previous high reached in, you guessed it, 2007. And that estimate could even be conservative, given that we’re still only three quarters into the year and stock prices have...
Read any financial news site today and it will be full of accounts of people who worked hard to retire early. Whereas most Americans hope to retire around 65 and think of retiring at 50 as retiring early, some of these accounts feature people who have retired as early as 35. It’s pretty impressive to think that people have...
For decades stock markets have been viewed as proxies for the strength of the economy. The higher stock market indexes go, the stronger the economy is deemed to be. The most famous index, of course, is the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which in recent days has pushed back to record new highs. But while many people, President Trump included,...