While I am not qualified to discuss psychology, I can still wonder about it.  For example, I don’t understand the sadness and exasperation at the loss of sports this season, due to Covid.  One pundit estimated college football alone contributed $4 billion to our annual GDP, a paltry contribution in a $22 trillion economy.  Of … Continue reading Enthusiasm in a Cynical World

Because the bond market is so much bigger than the stock market, it has long been the accepted-wisdom that you could “read” the bond market for a reliable understanding of change in the financial markets.  For example, one could learn a great deal about risk appetite and about inflation expectations.  That is no longer true.  … Continue reading Tea Leaves . . .

It will be a long time before we get meaningful estimates of the total monetary cost of the pandemic, but I’m confident TEN TRILLION DOLLARS will be low. If you measure only the 6% GDP drop in Q1 and the 33% drop in Q2, you get about $3 trillion.  Now, let’s assume that was the … Continue reading Taking Our Medicine Now?

A gun lover is NOT the same thing as a gun-nut.  I have had guns since I was a boy and am not sure how many guns I have today.  After the Army, I even joined the National Rifle Association for a few years.  In those days, it was primarily an interest group and sponsored … Continue reading Good Riddance!

Mark Warner is the senior Democratic U.S. Senator from Virginia.  When he was running for the office in 2008, he described himself as an “extreme moderate.”  While I always liked that philosophical description, I was slightly suspicious that it might be self-serving, as Virginia was still a fairly Republican state at the time. Recently, I … Continue reading Moderates, Unite!

The stock market can handle bad news, but it hates surprises.  No economic data is more closely watched than the monthly “Jobs Report” issued by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on the first Friday of each month.  It is always a comparison against expectations.  If the data is better than expected, the market will go … Continue reading Quick — tell the President!

First, there is an increasing certainty of future tax increases. Both Republican economists and Democratic economists agree on one thing — an over-concentration of wealth is bad for democracy.  Of course, that’s where the agreement ends!  The Republicans think it is a small problem that will eventually fix itself, as succeeding generations divide up the … Continue reading Opposing Forces

Every business has a seedy side.  Not even the church business is spared.  In the financial world, I’ve always found the world of offshore asset-protection-trusts (APT) to be one of the most seedy places.  There are many legitimate financial planning reasons for asset protection, such as protecting a kid’s inheritance from bad marriages, etc.  The … Continue reading A Tiny Bit of Good News