Market sentiment changes awfully fast these days. Rising concerns about the impact of interest-rate hikes pushed the S&P 500 down more than 5% in January (with the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Inde...
Tag: economic performance
Bitcoin’s Price Isn’t Done Falling. How It Could Drop to $10,000.
Text size Stifel’s top equity strategist thinks Bitcoin prices could sink to $10,000. Dreamstime.com The bull case for Bitcoin is that it powers up to $100,000, from recent prices around $43,000...
Tesla Finally Gets a Mention as Biden Talks Up Electric Vehicles
Text size President Joe Biden spoke in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday. Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images President Joe Biden just publicly said the T-word— Tesla —seeming to extend an olive branch to ...
‘If you’re a wage earner you’re going to fall behind’: Ex-Fed insider warns of ‘difficult few years’ due to inflation
Former Federal Reserve insider Thomas Hoenig thinks the U.S. faces a painful reckoning because of high inflation. Hoenig was a lone dissenter eight times in 2010, when the Fed voted to pursue a then-n...
Opinion: Should you add residential real estate to your retirement portfolio?
Is there a way to invest in residential real estate as an asset class? It’s a timely question since, as I pointed out last week, residential real estate can play an important role in reducing the prob...
The next ‘pain trade’ could be on the horizon as investors crowd into bets pegged to Fed monetary policy
Investors may be set up for the next so-called “pain” trade, with market participants increasingly coalescing around expectations that Federal Reserve needs to act aggressively to combat persistent U....
‘This is not 1980’: What investors are watching as next U.S. inflation reading looms
Investors next week will be closely watching for the latest reading on U.S. inflation, which has been running hot against the backdrop of a volatile stock market in 2022. “Inflation will be the data p...
The Jobs Report Reveals a Booming Labor Market. Here’s Where Interest Rates Are Headed.
Text size President Joe Biden speaking about the January jobs report. Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images Good news for Main Street, not so good news for Wall Street. Once again, a booming labor market is like...
Forget About Inflation. Contrarians Expect a Recession and a Drop in Bond Yields.
“Something that everyone knows isn’t worth knowing,” as the famed financier Bernard Baruch once observed. And so I was reminded by a long discourse in the New York Times this past week on why bond yie...
California, Florida, and Inflation Are Sinking Solar
Text size Ethan Miller/Getty Images The solar power industry is destined to grow many times over in the coming decades, and several companies will undoubtedly become behemoths. But the current picture...
Opinion: These 2 numbers sum up why the housing market won’t get back to normal for a long time
Last week I got a letter in the mail. Like you, I’m surprised this still exists as a practice but desperate times call for desperate measures: Courtesy Ben Carlson Now I would like to think our house ...
Opinion: Biden borrows too much, while America’s economy hollows out
It’s easy to be distracted by Russia’s provocations in Ukraine and the Federal Reserve’s new war on inflation but as the economy recovers from the delta and omicron variants, difficult post-pandemic c...
Housing Market Is the Fed’s Frankenstein, and It Won’t Be Easily Tamed
Fed chief Jerome Powell says there is an ‘element of uncertainty around the balance sheet’ and the central bank’s plans to shrink it from the pandemic-inflated $9 trillion at which it now stands. Grae...
Here’s What to Watch as the Fed Gets Set to Raise Rates and Shrink Balance Sheet
Anxiety is high as the Federal Reserve wraps its first meeting of the year. Will the central bank abruptly end its emergency bond-buying program ahead of schedule? Are more rate increases in store, an...
Fed will raise its policy interest rate above the inflation rate ‘sooner rather than later,’ says ex-governor Quarles who resigned last month
Former Federal Reserve Governor Randal Quarles said Tuesday that he thinks the Fed will move swiftly to raise its policy interest rate above the inflation rate because that is the only way to defeat i...
Opinion: Thankfully, the Fed has decided to stop digging, but it has a lot of work to do before it gets us out of hole we’re in
NEW HAVEN, Conn. (Project Syndicate)—The Federal Reserve has turned on a dime, an uncharacteristic about-face for an institution long noted for slow and deliberate shifts in monetary policy. While the...
Opinion: Retirees in the U.S. do not live on ‘fixed incomes’
As inflation has gained traction in the last year, commentators constantly remark about how it is particularly hard on retirees who live on a “fixed income.” Please stop. Retirees do not live on fixe...
The Fed Is Ignoring the Money Supply and Letting Inflation Rip
Text size Farmers descended on Washington to protest high interest rates in 1979. Charles Harrity/AP/Shutterstock About the author: Robert Heller is a former member of the Federal Reserve Board of Gov...
A Rising Misery Index Points to Four Rate Increases in 2022
Now, in the winter of our discontent, it shouldn’t be surprising that the Misery Index has made a comeback. Those of a certain age will recall it was a measure conceived in the 1960s by the economist ...
Roaring U.S. housing market may cool, keep climbing as Fed ends emergency support
U.S. home prices roared almost 20% higher in the past year, giving families who own properties a major boost to their finances during the pandemic. But Wall Street, a key source of home mortgage finan...
Lael Brainard Says Inflation Is ‘Too High.’ She’s Open to a Rate Hike in March.
Text size Lael Brainard Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images Cutting down inflation will be the Federal Reserve’s most important task for the foreseeable future, Fed Gov. Lael Brainard said at her confirmation...
Why a falling dollar signals ‘markets are in wonderland’ over inflation and Fed
The U.S. dollar is offering up an early 2022 head scratcher: Why does the currency keep falling even as traders aggressively pencil in as many as four interest rate increases by the Federal Reserve th...
Mortgage Rates Surge. The Pandemic’s Ultralow Rates Are Over.
Text size The average rate of a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage was 3.45% this week. Brandon Bell/Getty Images Mortgage rates climbed to their highest point since March 2020, according to data released Th...
Inflation hit a 31-year high. 7 pros on how they invest during high inflation
Getty Images If you feel like you’ve been paying more for everything from food to tech products, you’re onto something: In December, consumer prices rose 7% from a year prior, which is the highest U.S...
Here are the ETFs to buy on persistently higher inflation in 2022 and beyond, says BlackRock’s head of iShares strategy
Given an outlook for high U.S. inflation that’s likely to persist beyond 2022, Gargi Chaudhuri of BlackRock Inc., the world’s biggest asset manager, says investors should continue to hedge their portf...
Inflation and the Fed: Why Wall Street Is Misdiagnosing Pandemic Economics
About the authors: Larry Hatheway and Alex Friedman are the co-founders of Jackson Hole Economics, and the former chief economist and chief investment officer, respectively, of UBS. The Federal Reserv...